“Ah, how I would like maybe to live among all the foreign women students!” Arnaud said, grinning a grin so wide that it made his dimples dance. I was like: No way. He was the most unbelievably gorgeous guy I’d ever seen! And there was something so charming about him, so — different. Not different as in weird, but different as in special.
Okay, I’ll admit it: That very first time I met him, I fell madly in love with Arnaud. MADLY! But not in the gross high-school-crush way. Or like I was obsessed with him, sending thought waves toward him in the hopes that he’d hear them and ask me out. (Okay, maybe I was a little obsessed, but at least I didn’t go around blabbing about how cute he was and how I just had to make him notice me.) I was in luck, though: Two days after we first met, there he was again, this time going into a used bookshop across the street from the university library. I waited a minute or two, then headed into the bookstore myself. It was dark and dusty inside, with sagging wood floors and a fan propped in the corner of the ceiling, waving the lit dust motes around. I spotted Arnaud three rows back and slowly made my way toward him — but not before I’d picked up a book on Picasso so he’d think my being there was just a coincidence.
“Bonjour,” he said as I rounded the corner. I looked at him like: I’m sorry, but do I know you? Then I smiled. “You’re the guy from the ATM line, right?” I said (in French).
“And you’re the girl from NYU,” he said. “Someday, maybe I, too, will go there. To get my doctorate! In philosophy, no? In New York! Paris — she is beautiful, no? But New York is America!”
He was just so . . . well, I know it’s a funny word to apply to a guy, but he was beautiful. Slim but not skinny, on the tall side, with light-brown curly hair, slightly freckled skin, and eyes the color of green sea glass. Plus, he had style. Not like a gay guy or a hipster or a self-styled bohemian, either: Arnaud’s style was very casual, as if he’d picked his clothes up off the floor, not even noticing what they were, but at the same time, completely perfect. His faded jeans were rumpled; the cuffs of his white cotton button-down shirt were slightly frayed, rolled up to just beneath the elbow; and his expressive feet were in brown leather sandals. He carried a beat-up raincoat draped over his left arm, as if it were a cape.
The first time I went out with Arnaud, it started to rain, and there I was, again, kicking myself for having forgotten to bring my raincoat. As we ambled down the rue Danielle Casanova, though, I must have shivered, because the next thing I knew, Arnaud was taking off his own coat and offering it to me. It was only when my left arm and side were inside the raincoat that I realized that he was still in it — that we were sharing the coat, each of us with one sleeve and one front flap. Because I’m so tall, it fit me perfectly. Arnaud noticed it, too, saying: “Comment bien vous regardez dans mon manteau! Très belle.” (How well you look in my coat! Very nice.)
Inside, the lining was worn and warm, and it gave off a powdery fragrance, as if it had been absorbing the dusty fragrance of old books for years. It smelled, I realized, like him.
We laughed all the way to the café, and when we got there, I noticed people looking at us, smiling. It was like all of a sudden I’d become a movie star, an icon: someone who everyone recognized and wanted to know. It was as if I’d been injected with magic juice.
It wasn’t just that Arnaud was cute, either. Lots of guys are cute. But Arnaud had a kind of grace and flourish that was so, so, so, so, so, so different from the stupid, adolescent boys at school and my dreadful, idiotic brat of a brother, who, by the way, thinks he’s a drummer. Meryl and Daddo gave him a set of drums one year for Christmas because, in the words of my mother: “Danny needs a healthy way to get his energy out.”
“Paris is so quiet in the summer,” Arnaud murmured. “Everyone goes away.”
“New York’s like that, too. By August, it’s dead.”
“You need to come back in the fall or winter, when Paris is back to normal. When everyone returns. When there’s life on the streets. In the summer? Nothing but tourists.”
“Like me?” I said.
“No,” he said, with a delicious, mischievous smile on his face. “You, a tourist? Never.”
Before Arnaud, I’d never walked in the rain singing, never had someone recite poetry to me, never been to a Polish movie with, mais oui, French subtitles, never gone to a midnight movie, and never . . . well, you know. Not that we went all the way, or even close. But the truth — and I’m kind of embarrassed to admit it — is that I’d never really kissed anyone before. I mean, guys had lunged at me plenty of times, and I’d tried it, but basically they had all grossed me out. With Arnaud, though, it was different. Everything about him, from his handsome chin to the clean way his skin smelled to his shaved cheeks to the laugh lines at the corners of his mouth made me feel comfortable around him, willing. Still, I was nervous. I didn’t want Arnaud to know how inexperienced I was. I didn’t want him to know that my dad was the most old-fashioned father in the whole world, who’d grown up in a Costa Rican neighborhood going to church every other second, and that I still, on occasion, sat on his lap. Nor did I want him to know that my mother had made a career out of writing about my “adolescent years.” After all, he thought I was already in college!
He took me to the rue Mouffetard, which has open-air stalls selling old books, sheet music, china, jewelry, everything. He took me to hear a lecture on the late work of Camus. (It was in French, so I didn’t understand most of it.) He took me to his favorite spot on the Seine, where we watched the barges making their slow way. In another flea market — this one in the Marais — we stopped at a stall that sold nothing but the most beautiful silk scarves, but even secondhand, I couldn’t afford to buy one, even though I was dying to and tried on half a dozen of them, just for fun. So you can only imagine how amazing it was when, a few days later, Arnaud gave me most beautiful Hermès scarf I’d ever seen — pale pink, with tiny swirls of delicate grays and greens, wrapped loosely in crumpled brown paper, like he’d stuffed it in his pocket on the way back from the Marais market. As I turned it over in my hands, I noticed that on one end of the scarf was a tiny stain in the shape of a heart, and wondered if he’d seen it as well.
“You must have it,” he said. “Pour toi, la belle fille.”
“Where did you get it?” I wanted to know.
“It isn’t important.”
“But it’s Hermès. It must have cost a fortune.”
“Ah, but as you can see, it is not new.”
“You went back to the flea market?” I asked.
“It is my secret,” he said.
When he put it around my neck, it was like his fingers were angel wings. Right there on the street, we kissed.
Of course he wanted more. Every night, it was like a wrestling contest that would determine which of us would be in control of my buttons and zippers. But it was hard for me to explain why I didn’t want to go further, especially since a part of me did. It’s not that I wasn’t grown-up enough, either: It was more that it was such a huge thing, and I wanted to make sure that he was the one. Of course, I could have blurted out the truth and told him that I was fifteen, but then what? Thank God that I’d had the foresight to edit my Facebook page, getting rid of certain embarrassing details like where I went to school, and defriending some of the undesirables who I didn’t correspond with anyway. I could have taken the whole thing down, but I liked seeing what my friend Robin was posting now that she had gone wardrobe-wild and had (thanks to me) a fashion internship at Libby Fine Design. Finally I just said: “Arnaud, I’m Catholic!” Which was only half true, because though Dad’s Catholic, Meryl’s kind of nothing.
“I’m Catholic, too,” he said, fingering my necklace. “Everyone in France is. This is all merely superstition, how we must stop what our bodies tell us to do. They try to control us with all this talk of sin.”
“But . . .” I said, but then, when I couldn’t explain, I’d kiss him even more. I’d kiss him and kiss him and kiss him. And then I’d leave to
get back to the dorm in time for curfew.
On my very last day in Paris, I skipped my final lecture on Picasso’s early cubist work to walk up to Montmartre with Arnaud. It was, of course, lovely. It was also, of course, raining. When at last we reached the very top, with its famous Basilica, it started to pour. As in chats et chiens. (Cats and dogs.) We dashed inside, where Arnaud, looking very serious, took off his raincoat, draped it over my shoulders, and whispered: “For you. To take home to America. You will wear this at NYU so you do not get wet. Non?”
“But what will you wear?” I said.
“That is why you must promise me that you’ll return it to me in person.”
“I promise,” I said as he leaned into me for a kiss.
When I got back to New Jersey, my French was really good and my entire sense of myself had changed. For one thing, I realized that I could never, ever tell my mother anything personal again, because if she ever found out about Arnaud? I could just see her next book: When Your Teen’s First Romance Ties Her in Tangles: The Daughter Doctor’s Guide to Unraveling the Knots. I hung Arnaud’s raincoat in my own closet — not in the coat closet downstairs, where anyone, such as my brat brother, might take it. I took my Hermès scarf out of my suitcase and, very carefully, I rewrapped it in tissue paper, putting it away in my underwear drawer as carefully as I could. I looked around my room, at my books, the photographs of Meryl and me together and of my friends from school, at my bed, with its white cover and brightly colored pillows, and wondered whose room it was. I may as well have been someone else entirely, a person who’d never heard of West Falls, let alone grown up there.
There were seven messages on my cell phone: five from Robin, one from my aunt Libby, and one from our old neighbor Mrs. Cleary, who’d just moved to Florida, asking me if I could come over to help her and Mr. Cleary pack. I called Robin back, but she was at her summer internship and couldn’t talk. Then I called Aunt Libby, who isn’t actually my aunt at all — she’s my mother’s cousin, and also my godmother, and also Libby Fine of Libby Fine Design, where Robin was interning. Libby didn’t answer, either. She was just about the most awesome person I’d ever known, and in fact had been the one to encourage me to study in Paris in the first place. The only mystery was how she and my utterly uncool mother were related.
Robin came over and told me all about how incredible her internship was, and then complained about the other intern, and then told me about her father, who was, like, always drunk, and then told me again about her internship. But the truth was? I just wasn’t interested. Her life seemed so — teenage drama. Over the summer, she’d gotten into these really crazy clothing combinations, like wearing a silky cami with cutoff jeans and hiking boots, and wearing her hair like Pippi Longstocking, in two long, straight, tight braids, and while she talked, my brain just kept flipping back to Paris, and how juvenile she seemed compared to Arnaud. Maybe, I thought, I should have gone further with him. . . .
I was still thinking about Arnaud when, after what seemed like forever, Robin left. But I didn’t even have time to Facebook him, because two minutes later the door opened and Lucy bounded in, with Meryl just behind, a glass of cherry soda in her hand. “Guess what?” she said. “We’re getting new neighbors. The word is that they’ve got a daughter around your age. Maybe the two of you will hit it off.”
“I doubt it.”
“What kind of attitude is that?” she said, putting the cherry soda down on my desk.
It was a stupid thing — the cherry soda, I mean — but when I was a kid, it was my favorite, a treat that Meryl let me have when I was feeling down or had a cold or just because, and even now Meryl kept it on hand for me for when she thought I was “in a mood.” For one long, weird second, I saw her as I had when I was little, and she was the most wonderful, understanding mother in the world.
Then she again spoke: “I brought you your favorite.”
“I can see that.”
“You seem so bored.”
“Meryl, it’s called living in the suburbs.”
“So what I thought was that you, me, and Danny could go to the shore tomorrow or the next day and Dad can join us over the weekend. What do you say?”
What should I say? That I couldn’t wait to go to the shore like we did every year, gee whiz, yippee! Maybe I could get some cotton candy and meet a lifeguard! And we could drink cherry soda until we were sick to our stomachs! Instead, I said:
“Does Danny have to come, too?”
“Yes.”
“Why can’t he stay here with Daddo?”
“Because he can’t, that’s why. Your father works, for one thing.”
My father is a neurologist. That’s how he and Meryl met: in med school, before Meryl dropped out and decided to get a degree in clinical psychology instead.
“You work, too.”
“I know I work, Becka. But it’s August, and I took the entire month off, like I do every year.”
“I still don’t understand why the Little Jerk has to come.”
“Because he does,” she said. “And don’t tell me that your father can watch him, because he can’t. And don’t call him ‘the Little Jerk.’”
“Danny should be muzzled.”
She shrugged. “What will it be? Do you want to go to the shore with us, yes or no? Because since you’ve come back from Paris, all you’ve done is mope around, and I, for one, think you could use a little sand and sea.”
I didn’t mean to be a brat about it, but after Paris, the shore was lame. I mean, I know how lucky I am to have all the nice stuff I (we) have: nice clothes, good schools, the house in West Falls plus the cottage in Atlantic Cove. My parents rented it out for June and July, and we always went in August, with Daddo going back and forth, depending on how much work he had. Even so, the Jersey shore? I was supposed to be all happy about that?
“Oh, good!” Meryl said, even though I hadn’t answered. “We’ll have such fun!”
By which she meant that she’d try to turn me into a ten-year-old all over again so she and I could go looking for pretty seashells together, or collect seaweed and dry it in the sun, or even (her favorite) ride our bikes to the ice-cream store! She just wouldn’t give up. Like, after we got to the shore? No sooner had I put on my bikini, which was the exact same one I’d had last year, than Meryl said: “You’re not wearing that, are you?”
“It’s a bathing suit. I’m not wearing it to school.”
“What about your little brother?”
“What about him?”
“Don’t you think it’s a little — inappropriate — to wear that when he’s around?”
“You’re sick in the head, Meryl. He’s my brother.”
“And I’d really prefer that you don’t call me Meryl.”
“All right, Mother.”
She crossed her arms, the way she does when she’s relenting. Then she said: “All the literature points to girls your age not knowing how provocative you can be.”
“Jesus, Mom!”
It was worse when my father wasn’t with us, and I missed him. Because at least when he was with us she didn’t tell me what to do and how to act all the time. He was so cute, my daddo was, with thick black hair that he was always batting away, and a slight Spanish accent from having grown up in his mainly Latino neighborhood in Yonkers. I secretly thought that Mom was jealous of him — because he’d finished medical school and was now a doctor, whereas she was just a therapist.
“Just make sure you wear a cover-up,” she now said.
When she was gone, I logged on to Facebook and went to Arnaud’s page to look at his photo albums. My favorite was the picture of him wearing “my” raincoat and a floppy hat, and holding a book. There was a picture of the two of us together, too, but it had been taken by one of the merchants at the flea market and was blurred. Another picture was of him skiing. Finally, I went to the beach and let the sun beat down on me. When I emailed him later that day, all I wrote was: “I’m at the sea with my family. Mis
s you!” (Except, of course in French.)
And he emailed me back: “Oui, oui, la belle mer! Beau, la mer magique . . .”
I’m not an idiot: I was aware that I was only fifteen and that the idea of my sailing off to Paris to live in some kind of happily-ever-after land with Arnaud was a fantasy. But I also knew that, somehow, Arnaud and I would be together again, that the two of us had something special.
So how weird was it that the first thing I did when we got back from the shore was go to my room, open my closet, and press my nose into Arnaud’s raincoat ? It was the only thing that made me feel, if only for a second, that I was with him again, walking hand in hand down winding lanes.
The Little Jerk barged into my room. “Want to hit some balls with me?”
“No, I don’t want to hit some balls with you. I’m busy.”
“Busy doing what? Why are you smelling Daddo’s raincoat?”
“For your information, it’s not Daddo’s raincoat. And I wasn’t smelling it.”
“I saw you.”
“You saw nothing.”
“Mom says you’re grumpy. She says that you must be getting your period.”
“What?”
“What’s a period?”
“Get out of here before I bash your brains in.” I meant it, too. I was bigger than he was — a lot bigger — and perfectly capable of breaking his nose. In case he didn’t believe me, I turned to him, my hand balled into a fist.
“I guess I’ll Google it,” he yelled as he ran out.
The next day, Meryl popped her head into my room and announced that the new girl — the one whose family moved into the Cleary’s house across the street — would be coming over soon.
Tales From My Closet Page 3