It's Not Love, It's Just Paris

by Engel, Patricia

  Please keep my parents safe and healthy so they don’t drop dead before I have a chance to make them proud of me. Bless Santi so he doesn’t get anyone pregnant and stops drinking and driving. Bless Beto so he doesn’t accidentally kill himself on purpose.

  I didn’t know what else to pray for. I’d been lucky all my life. So I prayed to be a better person. Productive. Useful. Not the kind of girl who just is.

  And then I added one little selfish prayer, for love, which I thought could pass for an honorable pursuit, but it was an amorphous prayer, as if I didn’t even know the words to my own wish.

  I was hogging prime kneeling real estate with people waiting for a turn behind me, and my legs were stiff. I stood up and went to the gift shop to buy my mother a little silver medal of the virgin, which I figured she’d sew into Beto’s pillow or something. She was sneaky like that; there was a time when the lady used to sew santos into my panties to protect me from taking them off for boys.

  The three o’clock sun was still high, so I ducked into a small fenced park, a playground at the far end with children on the swings but they weren’t the noisy kind, so I settled onto a vacant bench along the perimeter. I’d been walking around Paris with a stack of postcards since my arrival. My plan was to pre-stamp them, jot things down whenever I had a moment of inspiration, and drop them in a mailbox so Beto would receive a constant stream of correspondence and know I was thinking of him, because he was still refusing to speak to me whenever I called home.

  When he was born, I decided Beto was my baby. I watched him in his crib, poked his fat cheeks, tickled his toes, and picked his outfits. My mother wore him around her chest like a scarf, and I envied her motherhood, the intuitive way she tended to his hunger, his burping, his changing. I pushed him in his stroller, held his hand as he learned to walk around the house. During his years of resisting solid food, sometimes he would only accept my spoon, and when he started climbing out of his toddler bed at night he’d come to me, not my parents, and curl into my side until morning, sleeping with a scowl, his fists clenched against his tiny chest. When his darkness overtook him, I was the only one who could get near him, and he’d tremble in my arms with the fear he was born with and stare back at me with the eyes of a beaten animal.

  Beto didn’t want me to come to Paris or to ever leave him. He was the reason I didn’t live in a dorm when I went to college and why I chose a school nearby. The doctors said we shouldn’t be manipulated by his threats, but I was a pushover. I spent years gathering the nerve to leave for Paris. Beto came to my room while I packed, moaning that I was the only one who understood him, the only one who looked at him without pity, who didn’t judge him and think his life a waste just because he didn’t know how to turn off the pain of living.

  “If you really love me, you won’t leave me.”

  I took him into my arms. I was the only one he let embrace him that way.

  “You have to learn to live without me watching over you.”

  “You say that like you’re not coming back.”

  “I’ll always come back.”

  But it wasn’t enough. I left him crying, and to punish me, he didn’t come with the rest of our family to see me off at the airport.

  There was a stone bust of a man on a pedestal a few feet away. I went to take a closer look and the plaque below indicated it was Chateaubriand—a helpful coincidence because one of Beto’s rabbits was named Chateaubriand, and I decided it would be the subject of my postcard. Beto always gave his rabbits historical names. He was failing most of his classes but he was quite a reader, always stealing my books and scribbling Beto Was Here on the cover page when he was through. I wrote that Chateaubriand the bunny had a park in Paris named in his honor, described the iron fence, the manicured shrubs, the soft chatter of local children playing on the swings that sounded like the Chapi Chapo twins. I wrote that I missed him. I loved him. I promised I’d bring him presents when I came home for Christmas. Baby brother, cuídate.

  And then I heard my name.

  Cato’s face came into focus across the gravel path. Somehow I’d walked through the iron gate without noticing him sitting on the bench opposite me. How funny, I thought, and then remembered to speak outside my own mind.

  “How funny. I saw you just yesterday.”

  “No, the day before.” He stood up and walked toward me.

  “No, yesterday. At Gare Saint-Lazare. On the platform.”

  He looked confused.

  “I saw you,” I repeated. “You waved at me.”

  “I didn’t leave the Seventh yesterday.”

  “Then it was somebody who looked a lot like you.”

  “Maybe you dreamed it,” he smiled.

  “No, it just means you’re common-looking.”

  He walked closer. His shadow fell over me.

  “What are you writing?”

  “A postcard to my brother.” I held up the image side of a Notre Dame gargoyle.

  “Can I sit by you?”

  I nodded and he sat beside me, only my handbag between us. I was never any good at chitchat, a hindrance to my purported goal of being a diplomat; stranger conversation was torture, even with a half stranger like Cato. I tried to think of something to say. Something intelligent and amiable to fill the air now that he’d made an effort to be near me.

  “You don’t say much, Lita. Are you shy?”

  “Yes.” No harm in honesty.

  “Most people can’t get enough of the sound of their own voice.”

  We looked at each other. It was strange to see him in daylight. His face, all sharp angles, pale sea-foam eyes flecked with bronze.

  “My mother used to tell me the quiet ones have the most to say.”

  “Was she shy?”

  “No, she said it to make me feel better. I was very shy as a child. I still am.”

  He pointed to the Missions Étrangères building beyond the brick wall at the far end of the park.

  “She worked over there when she was young. Whenever we came to Paris she took me to visit her old friends there and then to play here in this park afterward. I always looked forward to it.”

  “You came to Paris often?”

  “Not very often. Just a few times a year. My mother and I lived on the coast but my father always lived here.”

  “They’re divorced?”

  “No. They just preferred to live apart.”

  He went silent. My palms moistened and I slipped the postcards into my bag before my sweat made the ink run, but he took it as a sign I was leaving and offered to walk me home. I immediately regretted having moved at all.

  I wasn’t planning on leaving but now felt I had to. He held the gate open and we stepped back onto rue du Bac. The house was less than a five-minute walk away but I walked slowly. I wanted to ask him what he’d do for the rest of the afternoon, if we could go back to the bench and sit there even if just to sit quietly and watch the children pump their legs higher and higher on the swings.

  “How much longer will you be in town?” It was all I could manage.

  “Not much longer.”

  We were already at the driveway. I thought I could invite him for a coffee or a cigarette like any of the other girls would do, but I only stood still, looking at my feet, then up at him, and he did the same. I could have asked him about his cousin. Anything to have a reason to stand there a moment longer, but he pulled back—no bise for me even though people around there were promiscuous with their double kisses—and gave a small wave just like the guy on the train platform he said was not him.

  He walked backward in the middle of the tranquil road, facing me.

  “Maybe we’ll run into each other again.”

  “Maybe.”

  The sight of him, the distance growing between us, hurt me more than seemed reasonable. This wanting to be near him, the impulse to jump into a void. There’s only one word for it in any language I know—the Spanish corazonada, a premonition, an awakening of the heart. A tightening. A fist
closing around it.

  5

  It was Séraphine’s idea to have a party on the first full moon of October. She allowed one grand fête per season. Anything more, she said, was just a plea for attention. There was a box of calling cards she kept locked away printed with Les Filles de rue du Bac in raised black ink that she pulled out expressly for these occasions, giving us each two dozen to offer our special guests. The idea was that nobody should be admitted to the party without one.

  Loic gathered us around the dining room table and had us draw up tentative guest lists to avoid overlaps. Tarentina reigned as the VIP queen at nightclubs full of the highly moneyed and their hangers-on, while Giada’s network consisted of hippie kids, techno-mongers, and art students from Oberkampf to the Bastille. Dominique ran with the Phoenicians, the Persians, and the petrolbloods. Camila’s leg was the Latin culos de oro, fresas, hijos de papi—children of moguls, politicians—current, couped, overthrown—the exiled and the kidnapped, who mostly circulated in private house parties. Saira’s contingency, beyond Stef, was the Swiss boarding-school alums, African junior royals, and import/export heirs with whom she regularly ditched class for four-hour lunches. Naomi’s original crew consisted of the Americans, Australians, and Brits who held their own pub mixers, which allowed them to live an illusory Parisian life without learning a lick of French, though she’d mostly left them behind for her crowd of one: Rachid.

  Everyone had their circles but, like me, Maribel didn’t have friends outside the House of Stars. She rarely associated with the other students at Beaux-Arts, who she said were jealous of her being born into artistic fame. Her world was the workspace she’d been assigned in Florian’s studio a few doors down from Delacroix’s old house. I stopped by sometimes after my classes and found her sweaty and barefoot even on the coldest of fall days in that unheated building. Sometimes she stayed all night, working, she said, and only took naps on the mattress Florian kept pushed into a corner of his studio to “rest his bad back.”

  By the time Loic asked me who I wanted to invite, the guest list was already a hundred people deep.

  “I don’t know,” I told him. That much was true. “I can’t think of anyone.” That was a lie.

  I’d been hoping Sharif’s name would come up on Tarentina’s list, since we’d run into him a few nights earlier during the Stomy Bugsy show at Le Bataclan. He pushed against the mesh of sweaty bodies to greet Tarentina. In his face I saw bits of Cato, the same pronounced jaw, eyes that drooped at the outer corners into a tiny web of wrinkles. But the real Cato was nowhere in sight, and I thought of him, even after we left the club with a group of dread-locked surfers from Lacanau on their way to some big-wave surfing in the Mentawai Islands; a good-looking but banged-up group, all smiles and happy to share their Kashmiri hashish with the girls back at their hotel in République. Naomi and Rachid had split a taxi home with Saira, Stef, and Loic. I’d gone along with the leftovers and the surfers, figuring their company was better than no company.

  If Tarentina were to invite Sharif, I imagined he’d bring his cousin along, but she hadn’t mentioned him, so I did, at the end of the list-making, as if it were an afterthought, but Tarentina quickly dismissed the idea.

  Every afternoon in the week since our Sunday meeting, I’d walked past Chateaubriand’s park hoping to spot Cato on the same bench. I’d wandered up and down rue du Bac hoping to catch him doing the same. The only person who caught on to my stalking was Romain, who, after seeing me pass Far Niente’s window a few times in one afternoon, came out to the sidewalk to ask if I’d lost something, maybe my mind. I made up a story about dropping my métro card, and he joined my charade of searching corner to corner for a while before going back in to set up the dinner tables.

  I expanded my hunt to include rue Vaneau, hoping to see Cato step out of a doorway. I’d smile and say I’d gotten off at the bus stop at Les Invalides and was on my way home, which wasn’t so far-fetched, and if he was the gullible type he might think it was fate, a coup de destin, but it never happened.

  I want to say this without sounding foolish: In the nights since I first saw him by the torch, I’d felt a surprising hunger for him. I longed for a time we’d never spent together, memories we’d never made, conversations we’d never had, kisses we’d never shared. A strange future nostalgia.

  My education turned out to be very equitable on the gray market of international study. The paper I wrote for Dominique earned her an A, word got out, and within days I had a list of academic orders from other girls in the house and their friends. I experienced a pause of guilt because cheating is immoral no matter how you slice it, even if France made it nearly impossible for me to make an honest franc and I wasn’t even a sans papiers. But Loic insisted there was something to be learned in my fraud; manufacturing all those pages wasn’t intellectual prostitution but my own personal atelier for learning the subject of people.

  In trying to write as the girls would, I listened to the stories in their voices, beyond my early impressions and the basic biographical sketches we’d exchanged, listening and trying to push past their conversation patterns. The way Giada never contributed an original thought, only commenting on those already offered by others. How Dominique, following Loic around with the broken-down look of a circus elephant, was unable to look at a painting without thinking first of its monetary value. Tarentina saw nothing but herself in everything. I showed her the same painting and she launched into a story about her girlhood, the first time she felt a boy’s tongue in her mouth as he pressed against her behind a row of trees at the tennis club.

  I thought that after I’d written enough papers and saved some money, I might buy myself a new dress, but the night of the party, I wore the best old dress I had, a black cotton shift with short sleeves I’d worn only once before, for my college graduation. It was fitted to the body without compromising modesty, hitting below my knees. My mother had made it herself after I’d gone to the stores and couldn’t find anything I liked. Her eyes weren’t so good anymore, but she refused to wear glasses, and I’d watched her hunched over her sewing machine night after night after the rest of the family had gone to sleep, pushing the fabric along, the needle puncturing seams she’d realize were crooked, pulling them out with her teeth, only to start again. With the dress I wore the military boots I inherited at fourteen from my brother Santi, who’d bought them at an army surplus. I took them off only when forced into high heels or in the depths of summer when I traded them for sandals, even though my mother complained they made me look like a member of the FARC.

  Like my mother, I never wore makeup or blow-dried my hair unless it was freezing outside, so I was dressed and ready long before the other girls, who crowded around the bathroom mirrors, taking turns on the one power outlet in the house that wouldn’t combust under hair-dryer voltage.

  Romain and the Far Niente guys were rolling up rugs, pushing furniture against the walls in the grand salon, arranging the bar, while one of Giada’s DJ friends set up turntables and speakers. In the commotion, nobody but me noticed when the bell rang.

  I opened the door to a redhead in a furry blue coat and miniskirt, looking as if she’d walked a long way to get here.

  “I’m here for Loic,” she said, but if he’d been expecting her, he would have told her to use the side entrance to the family wing.

  She wouldn’t tell me her name, so I left her in the foyer and went through the narrow passageway under the stairs and banged on the wall until Loic opened the door, his shirt unbuttoned, damp hair uncombed.

  Later he would tell me her name was Élodie. She was one of his Avenue Foch prostitute friends and came to ask Loic for money to pay the babysitter holding her infant daughter as collateral. But there in the foyer, she only met Loic with the look of a guilty child and stared at me, unwilling to offer a single word until I was gone.

  “Lita, I was supposed to go to the pharmacy to get a medication for my grandmother before it closes. Can you go for me?”

 
“Of course,” I said, because Loic wasn’t one to ask for favors. He was one to do them without ever getting thanked.

  It was a jacketless night, the last thread of Indian summer before the blue season of winter arrived to smother us. There were three pharmacies on our stretch of rue du Bac, but Loic told me it was the one on the corner of Varenne with the diet pill display in the window. There were a few other customers in the queue snaking along the wall. Mostly old folks and a young guy ahead of me looking to buy condoms. I thought of Ajax, my favorite encyclopedia of useless knowledge, who, during junior high sex ed class, informed the teacher that condoms were invented in Condom, France.

  The guy ahead of me couldn’t decide what brand he wanted, so the pharmacy lady told him the benefits of each préservatif while I swallowed my giggle.

  Someone touched my arm with a chilly hand. I turned and saw Cato, his green eyes reflecting the fluorescent pharmacy lights.

  “You scared me,” I said, though I was delighted, and his hands, though icy, had rushed me with an unexpected heat.

  “I’m sorry,” he slipped his hands into his jeans pockets. “I just wanted to say hello.”

  It was my turn at the counter, so I handed the attendant the paper with Séraphine’s prescription and waited while she went to collect it.

  “I thought you’d left Paris by now.”

  “Soon.” He was beside me now, lips parted as if wanting to say more, but he didn’t.

  “We’re having a party at the house tonight,” I tried to sound spontaneous. “You’re welcome to come by. Bring your cousin and whomever else you want.”