What's Mine and Yours

by Naima Coster

  “You half?” Alexandra asked, offering Noelle a stick of gum.

  “My father is Colombian.”

  “Nice,” she said. “Well, look us up. We’re called Mega Fuerza. Come and see us play.” The girl finished retouching her makeup and left. It was only when she was gone that Noelle admitted to herself that she was in trouble. The vomit had confirmed what she already knew, and so had looking at Alexandra, her sweat and radiance, her lean torso. Noelle wasn’t the same. Something had shifted inside her.

  Duke was waiting for her outside the bathroom, clutching another soda and lime. He looked nervous. “Take me home,” she said, and they headed out into the night, their ears still throbbing.

  Duke led the way through the dark, unfamiliar downtown. Noelle wondered whether she’d come to school here, or whether she’d be able to go away, much farther. Duke wasn’t the kind of boy who would follow her. He’d stay in his church and meet a girl, work some job, buy a house on the west side. He’d take off his studded bracelets, cut his hair, and live out the life he was always going to have lived.

  Noelle wanted more. She wanted to be far away from Robbie, who was here and then wasn’t. She wanted away from her mother, who held up hateful signs and pretended not to hate, who had married Hank but still gave money to Robbie, held on to their old house. She was weak, small. Noelle wanted to be different. She wanted to live in a big city. She wanted to have friends who spoke Spanish. She wanted to order coffee from a coffee bar. She wanted to make things, to be around people who made things. She wanted out of the basement, a room of her own, where she could bring home boys, maybe even a girl, like the one from Mega Fuerza. She didn’t know what she’d do, or where she’d live, but she could go anywhere, be anything. If she could leave now, she would. She didn’t want to see how things would go at Central.

  “Noelle.” Duke was calling to her. She snapped back to the warm night, his cool, soft hand. “Are you okay? You only had one beer.”

  He was a sweet boy, and what they had for now was good and easy. Before they got home, they’d pull off somewhere, make out in the car. They’d put their tongues in each other’s ears. They’d go at it until he came, one way or another. He was her first boyfriend, but she’d found ways to do this, with her hands, her mouth, climbing on top of him. It made her feel competent, powerful. She could make him moan. She could make him say her name.

  “Noelle,” he said again, still worried.

  She smiled at him and kissed his knuckles. “I’m fine,” she said. “It’s just a little thing.”

  7

  September 2018

  Paris, France

  The café was modern, an oddity on this street in the eleventh arrondissement. It was brightly lit and industrial with concrete walls and floors. A glass wall separated the front of the shop from the back, where the bakers were molding dough, folding and beating, brushing butter onto croissants. Nelson sat by the window and watched them slide trays from the oven. The café had a euphoric name, something like La Bonne Espérance, and it was tucked into the corner of a frantic boulevard not far from the Bastille. Noelle would have liked the shop, its polish and grit. He thought of her as he looked out on the street.

  The neighborhood wasn’t as picturesque as the ones closer to the Seine, the rue de Rivoli. Out here it was all bus stops, two-euro crêpe stands, eyeglass shops, and pharmacies, a green square where children kicked around a soccer ball. Nelson could see the column of the Bastille, a quarter mile away, towering green and gold. The bronze nude atop was a man, winged, a torch in one hand, a broken chain in the other. A star over his head. Le Génie de la Liberté, The Spirit of Freedom. Nelson remembered enough of his college French to know that génie meant “spirit” and not “genius” in this case, which he appreciated since he didn’t believe in genius. There was only luck and social capital, as well as capital capital. It was true even for him, his career, but what did it matter? He was here.

  Rumor was that the café was black owned. He ordered a beignet and a coffee, turning down the espresso for drip, un café américain. Even across an ocean, he couldn’t deny his roots.

  The beignet was airy and fat, sugar dusted. He bit into the soft dough, the tart smear of raspberry jam, sifted clean of seeds. It was simple, perfect. There were many arts that weren’t considered arts but should have been. He ate with his eyes shut. He didn’t notice Jemima had breezed in, until he heard the scrape of a stool across the floor.

  “What’s the matter? Are you crying?”

  “Just communing with the dead,” Nelson said, and when she tilted her head at him, questioning, he went on. “Never mind. I was having a meditative experience.”

  “Sure,” she said, flipping over the menu. “Whatever. Do they have real food here or just pastries? It’s almost lunchtime, you know.”

  Jemima was dressed like a Parisian teenager in a silk floral dress and white sneakers, her bangs cut straight across her forehead. She had coffee-colored hair and olive eyes, a cell phone she kept glued to her palm. She had worn purple eyeliner every day he’d known her, today included. She was twenty-four, and Nelson was fairly certain this was her first job.

  She asked him how he’d spent the morning, and Nelson said he’d gone for a walk in the gardens, then a run. After his shower, he caught a taxi here to the eleventh for a coffee, dessert.

  “Hard at work, hunh?” Jemima waved over a server.

  “It’s my first day off.”

  “Do you think you could incorporate calling your wife into your day off?”

  “Noelle called again?”

  “Last time, she tried eleven times in a row. I was this close to blocking her number. But thank God, I haven’t heard from her in a few days.”

  “Me neither.”

  “And that doesn’t worry you?”

  “She left some messages about a party in the neighborhood. Nothing important.”

  “Not to you, no,” Jemima said and shook her head at him, too familiar. He liked this side of her, how frank she was, how she didn’t measure her words, worry about how she might be received. It was obnoxious, the product of her whiteness, her youth, her too-good fortune in life. It put him off when he noticed that unflustered air in men, but it was different somehow with Jemima.

  He watched her shuck off her leather jacket, so small it seemed to be a piece of clothing for a doll. A constellation of sweat spread over her upper lip, the mounds of her breasts.

  Jemima was a junior publicist at the French office of the house that had agreed to put out his book of photographs. She had served as his handler the last few weeks while he worked. She coordinated his meetings with the editor, people, and businesses of interest. The book was tentatively called Paris in Black and Brown, and while he was sure he would never earn out the advance, the deal included this trip, and it had come at the perfect time, just when he needed out of Golden Brook. There was a clause in his contract about the option of another trip, if he needed more shots. He didn’t think he’d have to use it, although it all depended on Noelle.

  A server wandered over to collect his plate. Nelson pressed his finger to the dish, licked the sugar off his fingers, the memory of butter. Jemima ordered them salads, a carafe of white wine.

  “So is this a real meeting? I thought we were all done. I leave in two days.”

  “I know, I’m the one who booked your flights, remember? I’m here to ask you to stay.”

  Nelson stared at her, disbelieving.

  “Please.” She rolled her eyes. “It’s a request from the house. They’ve got an offer for you.”

  A playwright had heard of the project and wanted to work with Nelson. He had written a play about a French woman, a widow, whose son was killed by a terrorist. She was having an affair with a Muslim man, and the death of her son threatens to tear them, and their community, apart.

  “Community?” Nelson repeated. “Is this a joke?”

  “He wants to incorporate your photographs in the set. Blow them up, get them printed
on silkscreens. It would be a beautiful way to show the work. You’ve heard of this guy before, right? He does very edgy stuff. Likely to get a lot of buzz. French nationalism, Islamophobia, suicide bombing, cross-cultural love—it’s all there.”

  Their salads arrived, and Jemima went on, trying to sell him on the project, while she divided their food. She picked out the eggs and baby potatoes from her salad, depositing them on his plate, so that soon she was left with nothing but vegetables and hunks of pale pink fish. It wasn’t one of her more charming qualities, the way she ate, as if she didn’t want to, as if food were a nuisance to be tolerated with the fewest number of calories allowed. She stayed away from the bread basket, too, although they were here, in Paris. This was perhaps the only way in which she wasn’t entitled, the only way in which she denied herself. Nelson helped himself to the bread. He doused the salad in oil. He asked how many days the project would add to the trip.

  “You’d have to go through the script together and do some mockups of the set. It could take a while.” Jemima was noncommittal as she guzzled her wine.

  “I’ll have to talk to my wife.”

  “One more thing, it isn’t paid.”

  Nelson laughed. “Then I’m out. What do they think? This is my summer internship?”

  “You’ll still get your per diem, and we’ll keep you at the hotel. Just think of how good this will look on your CV. Think of it as free publicity.”

  It was absurd to take career advice from Jemima, he knew. She was shortsighted and young, and she wasn’t an artist. She dealt in emails and lunches, buzz.

  “I can’t work for free. I’ve got a family.”

  “Correction—you have a wife. And you don’t seem too worried about her most of the time.”

  Nelson didn’t like the way she was talking, as if she knew anything about him and Noelle.

  “Don’t make that face,” Jemima said. She was talking and chewing at the same time, a sliver of fish lolling around in her mouth like a second tongue. “I didn’t mean to upset you. But there’s no way you can turn this down, and I don’t mean because of the book. You’re not ready to go home. I can tell.”

  Afterward, in his room, Jemima put on a robe and went to the balcony to smoke. They were visible from the street below, Jemima bare legged, Nelson back in his pants and undershirt. The wind whipped her hair around her face, she offered him her cigarette, and Nelson couldn’t help but think they were merely acting out their parts—the artist and the lady, two Americans in Paris, a white woman on the verge of the rest of her life, and her black lover.

  Sometimes, he had this feeling that his life was being watched, that other people could see not only what he was doing, but into his mind. He tried to revise his thoughts, as if they were a soliloquy someone might overhear. There was nothing romantic about this moment, the traffic below, Jemima tapping away at her phone.

  Nelson took in the view of the blue rooftops, the maze of sand-colored buildings. It was spectacular, more impressive than the faraway spire of the Eiffel Tower, the green corridor of the Champs-Élysées, all the sites that were reproduced on postcards for tourists. The city had changed so little since he’d studied abroad. He’d been a boy then, scrappy, in love with Noelle. He was in love with her still. He was just fucking someone else.

  “Read this.” Jemima handed over her phone. “It’s the first scene of the play. It won’t take you long.”

  Her cheeks were still flushed, and Nelson had a vision of how she’d looked, flat against the mattress, facedown. He had moved in and out of her slowly, the way she liked, although it had been hard to pace himself. It was worth the effort to watch her pant and squirm. He could please her consistently, deeply. And she was a shouter, which he loved. He had memorized her gasps and moans, replayed them for himself later. He had done a terrible job of containing what they had.

  Nelson leaned against the iron railing and scrolled through. “Oh God,” he said.

  “I know, it’s hardly Shakespeare.”

  Nelson read aloud. “The thing about endless war is that there is never a victor but always carnage.”

  “That’s sort of true.”

  “It’s melodramatic and didactic.”

  “You’ve got to see the theater where the show’s going up. Maybe that will convince you.”

  “This is supposed to be my day off. I’ve hardly had a chance to be a tourist.”

  “You’ll have plenty of time once you agree to stay on.”

  “You know, my wife used to be a theater director.”

  “I thought she was a housewife.”

  “You thought wrong.”

  Jemima put up her hands. “Easy there. I’ve got the utmost respect for housewives. My mom stayed home with me for years.” She tapped her ash over the edge. “You know, you never talk about your parents. You bring up your wife sometimes, as if you don’t want me to forget, but she calls so much, how could I? But you being married—that’s not very interesting. Your bio doesn’t even mention where you grew up. All your portraits of the South but no mention of how you know it. Whether you lived there, or visited grandparents over the summer. If your ancestors were slaves.”

  “Of course they were slaves.”

  “It’s like you want people to believe you came out of the ether. You think it’s mysterious, but that’s not what people want. They need a good origin story.”

  “The better questions are the ones about my art and not about me.”

  “It’s not just the art that’s for sale, you know.”

  Jemima got up on her tiptoes and kissed him on the cheek. Her lips were warm from the cigarette. “So you want to see this theater or not?”

  Nelson had started taking photographs on his road trips with Noelle. Neither of them wanted to go home for breaks, so they’d rent a car and drive. They went to Savannah, Charleston, the Smoky Mountains, once as far as Florida. Nelson took pictures of men at roadside fruit stands, orange groves and swamps, the high grass that presaged their arrival at some gray-water beach.

  He used an old point-and-shoot to take self-portraits in motel bathrooms and close-ups of Noelle, nineteen, pimply, and beautiful, underneath bristly, stained sheets. He liked the way a photograph could preserve the secret life of a person, a place. It was as if the world were offering itself continually if you would only look.

  He scraped together enough money from his campus jobs to pay the studio fee for a photography class. He won grants, got funding from the dean. He studied abroad in Paris one summer, Brazil the next. With his photographs, he was spared backhanded compliments from his classmates and teachers—there was no denying he was good. It was a consolation to be a natural.

  His first show after college drew a decent crowd, mostly Noelle’s theater friends. He hadn’t set out to create a series from his travels; he had just photographed older black men whose faces he found beautiful. He got a nice review and sold very little. Their lives went on unchanged. He worked production on film shoots, took dinky family photos on the weekends. He and Noelle filled the gaps in their paychecks with stints as bartenders, baristas, which made them feel noble, as if they were paying their dues. That phase lasted only a few years. Eventually, Noelle became director at a reputable company; Nelson got magazine work, started showing at galleries more.

  Soon they had plenty for dinner and cocktails and plays, long weekends to the Caribbean, where they snorkeled and drank on the beach, ate fried fish with their hands. They were solidly middle-class but felt rich, and it was more than just the luxuries. Their little life was peaceable. They worked; they came home; they saw friends. They cooked vegetables, drank oat milk, took vitamins. They went for night walks in the neighborhood and felt safe. They weren’t sick or broke, dead or dying. They had no addictions they could name. Their framed degrees hung in the foyer. They were better off than Nelson had ever known two people could be.

  Sometimes, when he was running, Nelson would be struck with the terrible presentiment that something bad had happene
d to Noelle. He didn’t experience it as a fear but as fact, a catastrophe he could sense, preternaturally, in his bones. She’d been hit by a bus, attacked by a stray dog, caught in a shootout and bled out when a well-meaning bystander couldn’t stop the wound. He’d run hard and fast in the direction of home, find her on the couch, glasses on, reading a play. He’d kneel before her, put his head in her lap, say nothing of what he’d seen.

  He would calm himself, and they’d go on, their little domestic life unspoiled. He might have been ambitious, but it was clear to him that all he really needed was her. Noelle was his key to a good life.

  There were other women only when he was away. A caterer he took back to his hotel room at a convention in Rio. A curator at a Manhattan gallery who lived in a loft with plum-colored walls. A graduate student at a lecture he gave in Chicago. A painter at an artists’ colony in Maine.

  They didn’t mean anything, except that, without Noelle, there was no way to steady himself. No one had ever usurped her place in his heart. He had called her, returned to her, always. But there was something new in what he was doing with Jemima. He was gallivanting with her around the city as if he belonged to her. And he was ignoring his wife. It was repulsive, even to him.

  Maybe he was trying to beat the universe to the punch. He’d ruin his own life before it got snatched away from him. But even to see his motivations that way was too generous. Maybe he merely wanted to punish her. Noelle had broken their first, most vital promise: to live well, to never look back. To go beyond what should have been possible for either of them. She had let herself sink, and he couldn’t follow her down. If he fucked Jemima, if he sent Noelle to voicemail, maybe she would hear: You won’t take me with you.

  The performance space was in a converted church not far from the Sorbonne. It had high ceilings and gilded walls, dusty velvet chairs. There were five hundred seats, which, Jemima was careful to point out, meant more people would see his work during opening week than likely had over the entirety of his career.