Romeo, Juliet & Jim

by Larry Schwarz

  “Okay then,” Henri said. “I’m just saying, you getting on the back of a motorcycle would certainly devastate Maman. Don’t you remember how upset she was when I took you for your first pair of Doc Martens?”

  Juliet laughed, feeling guilty at not letting Henri in on her bigger secret. “I’ll keep it in mind,” she said, hurrying upstairs to change.

  * * *

  She arrived at the Hotel Lemieux with her backpack slung over her shoulder, and though she’d had a proper shower that morning, Juliet liked the feeling that she might be just another broke and youthful traveler, not a fashion scion who’d been driven halfway here in a dark-windowed Mercedes. (From the library, she’d boarded the Metro.) Her hair was loosely clipped behind her head, and, because of the slight chill in the air, she wore a vintage YSL smoking jacket over a soft white T-shirt and torn jeans.

  Mounting the stairs to the second floor, Juliet imagined a scenario wherein Romeo might ask her to run away. In the clothes she was wearing, she felt ready. That she was probably the only potential runaway on earth to own a three-thousand-euro vintage jacket (though she usually could do a lot with very inexpensive finds, she would spend the family money when she thought something was worth it) did not cross her mind.

  She knocked once on the door to room 206, where Romeo said he’d be waiting. Like their last time here, Romeo flung the door open almost instantly.

  “I had to see you,” Romeo said, pulling her into the room and kissing her cheeks, her lips, her neck.

  His hands clasped her waist tightly and she pressed her frame against his, burying her nose into the crook of his neck and kissing him there until he let out a low groan.

  She ran her hands up his shirt and trailed her fingers down his back. Romeo felt at once that he’d been right to ask for her immediate presence. He couldn’t go so long without seeing her.

  “I’m so happy to be with you,” she said. “I’ve missed you so much.”

  Romeo held her at arm’s length, even though the energy in the air between them felt like strings that bound them together.

  “I more than missed you,” he said. “You’re all I can think about.”

  Juliet believed him. She pushed to the back of her mind the questions she had about Rosaline, and about how Romeo spent his time when he wasn’t with her. Jim had started to reassure her yesterday and now she was here with Romeo. What proof did she need?

  “I’ve been thinking of you, too,” Juliet said, feeling at once at home and confined by the room. In a few hours, they’d have to leave, and she hated how temporary things had to be.

  “Yesterday, when Jim said he’d been with you, I wanted to kill him.” Romeo was smiling as he said it, but the binding strings felt cut.

  Juliet frowned and took a step back from her lover.

  “What do you mean, since Jim said he’d been with me?”

  “At your house. For your cousin’s party.” Romeo’s mouth pulled down at the corners as he began to wonder whether there was more to the party than Jim had let on. Why would Juliet be upset that he knew?

  Walking over to the cracked wood-framed window, he opened it a sliver, letting the air inside. He suddenly felt hot, possibly faint. He looked out at the “courtyard,” really just a narrow area where the Dumpsters were housed. Across the way, he could see into the windows of other rooms in the hotel: Three guys passing a joint. A girl painting her toenails. Another couple, embracing.

  “So, that is the reason you needed to see me,” Juliet said, sitting in the room’s somewhat battered chair. The disappointment in her voice was crushing. “Not for me but because you fear Jim.”

  Romeo continued looking out the window, rather than at her. Part of him could picture Jim’s lips on hers, Jim’s arms wrapped around her.… Why had such visions come to him so easily? Was there truth to them?

  “Should I?” he asked.

  Juliet emitted a violent breath and pounded a fist on her knee. “What is wrong with you? You send him to me to tell me that your feelings are real but then you doubt me? He’s my friend. He is your friend. You must stop this.”

  She tightened her lips as she thought of holding on to Jim at the party, pretending to be with him to get rid of Pierre. There’d been a moment when she had enjoyed taking Jim’s arm possessively. She’d liked the feel of it beneath her hands. His skin was always warm, even through his clothes. But now she shook the memory away.

  “Well, when you’re with him and not me, I don’t know what to think.” Romeo twisted the gold rope curtain tie around his finger, but looked back at her with real concern in his eyes.

  Juliet hated him for thinking it but hated herself for enjoying Romeo’s jealousy. She’d had so much envy to contend with, not just from the photos of him with Rosaline at the Palais event but also from her knowledge that Romeo had been with plenty of women before her. He was her first and only—even her first kiss—while he’d admitted to filling a box with souvenirs of his conquests. He may have burned it, but that didn’t mean those dalliances had never happened.

  She always wondered, could she really compete?

  But now, wasn’t he telling her that she’d won?

  “If the only way for you to need me is to make you doubt me, then this is not the love we believed, is it?” Juliet said, softly. She wanted to provoke him.

  Romeo turned from the window swiftly, trying to hide the hurt in his eyes. “I always need you. And I trust in you. I hate that he can be with you in the daylight, at your home, with your family, while I can only be with you here.” It was true, but saying it aloud rattled him for how much he meant it. If he lost Juliet, it might break him.

  Her body flooded with warmth. She’d wanted, so badly, to know that she mattered to him, had the power to hurt him, even though she never wanted to cause him pain. “That’s what I’ve been saying, my love,” she said. “We deserve to be part of the world, not hiding from it.”

  Romeo ran a hand through his longish hair. “You know why we can’t,” he said. “You know with this Redmond thing, everything is harder than ever. My father doesn’t trust anyone right now. If he knew I was with you, he wouldn’t trust me, either. I’d be cut out.”

  Since giving the speech at the shareholders’ meeting and Henri’s incident, Juliet had felt more keenly what concerned Romeo. She still was not in total agreement, but she better understood his reasons for being the way he was. Who they were did matter.

  “We don’t need to talk about that now,” she said.

  Juliet crossed to the window, slipping out of her jacket as she did so. She threw it carelessly over the lumpy upholstered chair, then pulled her T-shirt over her head. She slipped out of her jeans just as fluidly and stood before Romeo, naked save for her delicate white underthings.

  “I have nothing to hide from you,” she told him, taking his hands in hers. “Let me prove it.”

  CHAPTER 19

  ROMEO

  “IS THAT A taxidermied rat dressed as Louis the Fourteenth?” Jim asked, pointing at a rat that was indeed wearing a brocade robe and carrying a golden walking stick. It stood upright, posed with one hand on its hip like it had important king business to do.

  “Yes, of course,” Juliet said. “What, they don’t dress up dead rats in your country?” Romeo belted out a laugh. Last week’s meeting at Hotel Lemieux had repaired things between him and Juliet, and today she’d suggested she get out of her house using the fake-school-project ruse again. She’d said they should bring along Jim. Romeo knew she’d said it to keep him from wondering about their relationship, but Juliet hadn’t put it that way, and he loved her all the more for it. She made even the hard things easy.

  “I thought the French were supposed to have taste,” Jim said, still regarding the animal quizzically. “That looks like something I could get in Alabama from someone who married their cousin. A keen eye, but still.”

  “Whatever, rich boy,” Romeo said. “As if you’d shop at a store in Alabama. We all know you bought your jacket alre
ady beat-up from the Dolce and Gabbana flagship.”

  “Touché,” Jim said, clutching his arm as if wounded by a sword. “It’s Gucci and I had them messenger it over, but you’re close.”

  As Romeo waved off a woman trying to sell him a paisley scarf, he wondered, how could he have been jealous?

  If there were something to be jealous of with Juliet and Jim, they’d never have both been here. Juliet loved him, not Jim, and the three of them were friends, just like she’d said.

  Juliet loved vintage shopping and had wanted to come here, to Les Puces, called the Queen of Flea, in the Twentieth. It was the world’s biggest flea market, and the perfect place to not be noticed, given the three thousand stalls and crowds of people too busy scouring the wares for a bizarre treasure to be paying much attention to them.

  “I need to get away from these dead animals,” Juliet said, dashing ahead of them to a stall filled with old sunglasses, scarves, and hats. “Come on.”

  She immediately found a men’s black fedora and a pair of oversized mirrored glasses. Bundling her hair atop her head, she placed the hat over it and tried on the sunglasses, which were far too big for her face, but that drew Romeo’s eyes straight to her bee-stung lips.

  “You know,” she said, curving those lips in a mischievous smile, “we should have disguises.”

  She started to root through a box of secondhand scarves, all of which had that dusty thrift-store smell. How was it that people could smell so different but their used clothing smelled the same?

  “I thought the whole point of coming here was that we wouldn’t need them,” Romeo said, politely shaking his head as he was approached by a small woman in a loose flower-print dress selling cell phone cases and knock-off Hello Kitty keychains. Even in Paris, there was a market for cheaply made Chinese crap, and for whatever reason, Romeo must have looked like the kind of rich sucker who would hand out euros just to get merchants off his back.

  “It’s more fun if we have disguises, though,” Juliet said, a strand of her hair falling from the hat and curling around her cheek. Her grin persisted in its infectiousness. And while Romeo loathed the part of their relationship that made the disguises seem like the right idea, he secretly saw a practicality to it. Juliet might have thought they were safe here, but really, you couldn’t trust any situation. He wouldn’t tell her that today. He knew how she hated being reminded of his practical concerns, and he’d stopped himself from pointing out the glances they’d received. The eyes of onlookers made him nervous and he had to tell himself they might just be admiring Juliet’s beauty, not recognizing who she was.

  So, yes, disguises might put him at ease. Because right now, he was enjoying himself, and enjoying being out in public with her—his girlfriend—and with Jim, his friend. He really did like having someone he could trust with his Juliet secret. Someone who, unlike Benny, wouldn’t push for sordid details. And who he knew respected the relationship.

  His phone buzzed in his pocket. He took it out and saw Rosaline’s number, along with a string of X’s and O’s and a photo of her in a bikini so stylized that it had to be from the fashion shoot she’d mentioned at the party last week.

  He’d screwed up there. He’d been so worked up—and had drunk so much—that he’d danced with Rosaline most of the night. He’d kissed her, just for show. But now she had been trying to arrange a date, and he couldn’t completely blow her off since she was one of Montague’s lead models for the next two seasons. She had amazing business acumen—she’d turned a Kate Moss–style drug problem into more modeling contracts and a successful life-coaching enterprise—and Romeo’s father thought the world of her. He would have loved to see Romeo paired off with her in a corporate coup to rub in the faces of the competition, take over social media, and help sales return to what Jean Montague called the “glory days,” when he was first dating Romeo’s mother.

  “What’s that?” Jim said quietly, startling Romeo. But Juliet didn’t hear him, as she was still going through the used clothing.

  “Rosaline,” Romeo said, deleting the message and shaking his head. “I need to extricate myself from that situation.”

  “You do,” Jim said. “But not right now.”

  See, he was a friend. A guy after your girlfriend would have made sure she knew about your too-close-for-comfort moments with another woman. Romeo told himself he’d been his own worst enemy, thinking he had something to fear with Juliet and Jim being friends.

  Jim started rooting through a bucket of hats and pulled one out to try on. It was an old-school biker hat that made him look like a young Marlon Brando, especially when worn with his leather jacket.

  “I like this,” Jim said, not hiding that he was admiring himself in the mirror.

  Romeo squelched the voice in the back of his head that wondered if Juliet thought Jim looked as good as Jim seemed to think he did.

  “I’ll do this one,” Romeo said, choosing a knit skullcap that gave him a thuggish vibe, as Benny would say, along with a pair of dark glasses that made his light hair look even lighter. He wasn’t sure if he looked dangerous or like some skinny poet with consumption and not enough time outdoors.

  Juliet stood on her tiptoes to kiss him. “You are so handsome, mon amour.”

  “Yes, mon amour,” Jim echoed in a teasing voice. “You look like someone who might steal my wallet.”

  “And you look like someone showing up for their first day of motorcycle school.”

  Jim laughed and raised a middle finger in a jovial manner.

  “Aww,” Juliet said, putting an arm around Jim in a purely friendly way. “But he looks handsome, too. Like Steve McQueen.”

  Steve McQueen … was he better-looking than Brando? Was he the one who died young? And Brando was the one who got fat.

  Romeo checked his reflection. He wasn’t a rugged motorcycle guy. He was almost pretty, like a young Leo DiCaprio.

  When Juliet let go of Jim, Romeo wrapped his arms around her waist from behind and pulled her into him. He kissed the back of her neck, the skin that had been exposed when she’d put her hair up.

  She sighed with pleasure.

  If he knew she was his, why did he so frequently feel the need to prove it?

  CHAPTER 20

  JIM

  “I’M STARVING,” JIM heard himself say. He wasn’t really, but trailing after Romeo and Juliet as they held hands was starting to wear on him. They weren’t treating him like a third wheel, not exactly, but when you were the third wheel you felt like one. And even though Les Puces was huge—they’d probably seen only a quarter of the vendors, if that—it was starting to feel repetitive. He wasn’t much of a shopper to begin with, and he had no use for the handmade soaps or bohemian-looking jewelry. He wasn’t even in the mood to chat anyone up, though he’d seen a few cute girls here and there.

  “Yeah, food would be good,” Romeo said, looping his arm over Juliet’s shoulder and pulling her close. Again. “What about you, Madeline?” He used the fake name Juliet said went with her disguise. Jim thought she looked more like a Billie, one of those rare girls who can adopt a guy’s name and make it that perfect mix of feminine and spunky.

  Juliet-Madeline-Billie nodded, and leaned her head against Romeo’s shoulder. Just like that Bob Dylan album with the famous cover. Jim had never listened to the album, but had always liked the cover.

  Romeo guided Juliet toward a small café on the Avenue de Saint-Ouen. Despite France’s reputation as a food mecca, Jim had discovered plenty of places like this, cafés that were something between a diner and a bistro, where the food was the definition of “fine”—satisfying but not necessarily memorable. He’d guess Romeo had been to a few, on nights out with his guy friends, but Juliet’s more limited experience brought her to nicer places with her family.

  Jim was always guessing things about them. What did he really know? Maybe his friendship was just a novelty for them. Some token American they could hang out with for a few months and then abandon.

  May
be he just had a crush on them.

  He was used to being the new guy with a crowd of admirers everywhere he went. In Paris, he was starting to feel like his fish-out-of-water status was what made him so intent on securing Romeo and Juliet’s friendship, instead of the other way around.

  Was it the way they’d met that first day that gave Jim the sense he had a bond with them, or was it just a little different here in Paris? Normally, other rich kids at his boarding schools seemed so intent on impressing each other. Everything was a social climb, even though they were all at the top. Romeo and Juliet weren’t like that. It was why he felt like their friendship was more real.

  He reminded himself that he wasn’t even supposed to be taking the friendship thing seriously. This was just a job, a mission for his dad. He had yet to give his dad any details, partly because his father hadn’t been home much. Still, he couldn’t imagine what he wanted to tell his father about his friends. He was starting to wish he’d just met them and befriended them naturally, somehow. He didn’t want to sell them out, but he feared—almost knew—that he eventually would. No one held out on James Redmond forever.

  Yet, every moment he spent with them, the more he felt like he was betraying everyone, himself maybe most of all. He felt especially confused about Juliet, if he was being honest. He wanted to not care so much when she laughed at one of his jokes or teased him about his American ways, but the truth was, she delighted him. But she was Romeo’s girl. Even if Jim had been a little disgusted by the scene Romeo had made with Rosaline the other night, there was a code with guys. Plus, he knew that Romeo was only with the model to keep up appearances. Or, at least to hear Romeo tell it, that was the reason.

  Romeo was already requesting a table when Jim asked, “Do they have anything for Juliet?”