Slowly, we move around to the front, accidentally photobombing at least six selfies. Once we’re there, I look up at the statue, and the first thing I notice is not the severed arms or the exposed breasts or the strange posture — what I notice first is something that I’d never really registered all the times I’d looked at photographs of the Venus de Milo.
“She’s got abs.” I mumble this to Jean-Luc, and he gives me another look, as if to say: “Seriously?” I shrug and tell him: “I’m just saying. How’d all those Ancient Greeks and Romans get so fit? It’s not like there were gyms in every village. I run twice a week, and my body fat has never been as low as what I’m seeing here. I mean, is it any wonder so many of them were — apparently — super cool with being painted or sculpted naked?” It’s a stupid thought, from a person who maybe isn’t taking the Louvre as seriously as she should be, but it feels like just the sort of discussion Mom and Dad would have had when they were here. Mom’s so practical, she probably saw the Venus de Milo and felt sorry for whichever poor saps had to carry it from place to place. She probably worried about them getting in trouble for dropping it and breaking her arms.
And what would Dad have said in response? He’d have reassured her, said, no way they’d have gotten in serious trouble, not once people got a look at the broken statue. With her arms, she’s just a normal woman; without them, she’s unique. Yeah, Dad probably said something like that, because Dad never wanted to think negatively about anything. Mom would have laughed, because she always laughed when Dad was so resolutely upbeat. Sometimes, she laughed because she loved his positivity; other times she laughed because she thought he was (the best kind of) silly.
But the point was, she laughed. They made each other laugh. Gave each other joy.
I steal a look at Jean-Luc, while he’s gazing at Venus, see his very serious, thoughtful face, so serious and thoughtful I find it hard to imagine him ever laughing the way I remember Mom and Dad laughing. In fact, I think the only time I’ve seen him smile today was when he said being at the museum with me was like being in purgatory.
I turn back to Venus. Man, how could some sculptor — working more than two thousand years ago — carve a totally lifelike human being out of marble when, in the twenty-first century, I sometimes need two tries to get my eyeliner on right?
*
After I’ve swung by a bust of a satyr with a really creepy smile (Mom and Dad always did seem to find the weirdest things funny), I have gotten every photo I came here to get. I am officially ready to move on to the next stop on the tour — Shakespeare and Company. And, of course, Jean-Luc has wandered off again. Seriously, it’s like having an overgrown, very serious toddler — okay, he might have an enjoyable accent, but he’s not exactly the best person to have around you when you’re trying to keep to a schedule. Although, I do kind of like the fact that he doesn’t talk down to me about stuff — even when I’m asking him, for the eighth time, “Is that baby supposed to be Jesus? Are those guys the musketeers?” Besides, if he wasn’t here, I’d just be a girl walking around by herself, sometimes looking a little confused, other times crying. It’s not what it would have been like had Mom or Lara been with me, but I am kind of glad Jean-Luc decided to tag along this morning.
I turn a one-eighty and find him creeping up on an elderly couple sitting on a bench, holding hands. I sidle up to him and hiss: “What are you doing?”
He startles. Doesn’t say “mon dieu!” or “sacré bleu!,” like I’m expecting him to. But he does give me a look as if to say, “Please don’t do that again.” He turns away as he checks the camera’s little preview screen on the back, nods to himself, then looks at me. “You get your last photo?” he asks.
I tell him I have, figuring he’s not going to tell me what he was doing …
He just nods again. “Then we can go.”
I have to jog to catch up to him. I say thanks for the tour, just to have something to say. When I see him fiddling with his camera again, I feel a flash of guilt at how I’m maybe getting in his way. He does have a project to finish, after all. “I can take it from here, though, if you need to finish up your work.” But I hope you don’t, I add silently. I hope you stay.
“I am happy to keep walking,” he says. It’s hard to tell if he’s being sarcastic. Maybe he is. Or maybe he is just being blunt. He could also be making a more general point about life itself.
Then he goes on. “Just as long as we don’t walk too fast, okay?”
I bite back my response that walking fast is kind of essential when you’re trying to cross off stops on a tour. Although, I doubt Mom and Dad were running around when they were here. They would’ve just been excited to be in Paris, with the person they loved, not some moody French dude who may or may not like them all that much.
I might be walking in Mom and Dad’s literal footsteps, but I am not going to be able to have their experience. I have a brief flash of despair — literally the one thing the Romance Tour won’t be is romantic, so can I really hope to truly understand what this city meant to my parents? Should I have abandoned this whole little mission as soon as Lara told me she was double-booked and had to go to Madrid with Henri?
No. Because, Mom will love the scrapbook I make for her, once it’s finished, and I’m determined to leave here having figured out a thing or two about what love really is.
Once we’re back outside, I turn up my collar to guard as much of my face as possible from the winter chill.
“So,” he says, “to the Left Bank? Shakespeare and Company?”
It’s not my mouth that replies, but my stomach. It suddenly gives a loud rumble that seems to go on forever.
Jean-Luc raises his eyebrows. They’re kind of perfectly shaped. I wonder if this is European genetics or if he has them done professionally. It would be kind of weird if he got them done professionally, right? Or maybe that’s just the “unenlightened American” in me talking. “Perhaps, instead, somewhere for breakfast?”
I feel blood creeping up into my cheeks. “Oh, it’s cool, I can just scarf a candy bar or something while we walk over the bridge.”
He makes a face at me like he’s not impressed. It’s not the first time I’ve seen this expression in the less than two hours I’ve known him. “If you are to have fuel for the rest of the day, you need real food. Not your processed junk. I’ll take you to a café.”
“But I don’t have time —”
“I do not think your parents starved themselves twenty-five years ago. If you pass out from hunger, you’ll miss everything else on your list. You must eat. Come, follow me.”
Which I do, grudgingly grateful that he’s leading me back across Pont du Carrousel. We’ll at least be on the Left Bank, so we won’t be getting farther away from Shakespeare and Company, and my rumbling belly is quite happy about this unscheduled detour.
~ CHAPTER FOUR ~
JEAN-LUC
12H05
I’m glad I got to spend an hour in the Louvre, even though it was strangely lacking in inspiration for me. Too many of my shots were invaded by tourists taking selfies with their backs to the art — because, obviously, it is more important to record “I was here” than to connect with the artists’ works. But perhaps most disappointing is the last photograph I got, of the old couple on the bench. When I took it, I thought I had perfectly captured their detachment from the museum around them, their frailty within the healthy, thriving culture — a culture which is timeless in a way that people are not — but now that I’m looking at it, I’m just bothered by how out of focus the museum is and how clear they are. It’s basically just a photo of an elderly couple who could be holding hands in any room in any city in the world. That was not the point. My theme is supposed to be “Stories from Paris” — not “Stories of People Dying Slowly in Paris.”
I look up from the camera to Serena on the other side of the table in the café. From the way her eyebrows are raised, I
gather she must have asked me something.
“I am sorry,” I say, putting the camera down. “I was distracted. What was the question?”
“How long have you lived in Paris? Your whole life?”
I shake my head. “Fourteen years. Before that, we lived with my father in New Jersey.”
“Oh, really? What exit?”
I don’t understand the question. I tell her this.
“You know, the New Jersey Turnpike,” she says. “That never-ending toll road from Hell. It’s in the opening credits of The Sopranos? Almost everyone in the state lives close to the Turnpike.”
“I do not remember it,” I say.
She seems shocked. “Seriously? What kind of Jersey Boy are you?”
“I suppose the exiled kind.”
Serena laughs as a waitress comes over and takes our order, in English — probably because she heard us speaking it just now. Serena asks for a chocolate crêpe and an espresso. That sounds good, so I ask for the same.
When the waitress walks away, Serena turns back to me. “So I guess you grew up speaking English?”
I nod. “Until we came here, obviously. I have been bilingual pretty much since birth.”
“I’m kind of jealous. I suck at learning new languages. How much do you remember about living in America?”
I shrug. “I have some memories, but they’re … muddled. The type of memories that could be real or could just be memories of things that other people have told me. But, to be honest, I try not to remember America all that much.” She makes an offended face — it might be sarcasm, but I don’t know her well enough to take the chance, so I jump in to clarify: “Because of my father, not the country. He was … not nice to my mama. I think he didn’t really want children — back then — and so was kind of always in a bad mood, you know? I remember my mother being sad, all the time.”
“He sounds kind of selfish,” she says.
“Yeah, that’s it exactly,” I tell her, nodding. “He’s selfish.”
She’s narrowing her eyes at me, her lips curling in a slow smile.
“What is it?” I ask.
“No, nothing,” she says, “just … there’re times when I can really hear an American accent trying to fight its way out of you.”
She’s smiling, like she thinks this is kind of cool — something that we have in common. I try not to let my annoyance show — even Mama occasionally likes to say that when we moved to Paris, we left behind everything but my accent. Since meeting Lara at the beginning of this semester, nasal vowels have started to escape my lips more than I like.
But I am not American. The only American in my life left long ago.
Serena’s peering at me. “You don’t talk much, huh?” she says.
Hmm. How long have I been silent? “That depends on who you’re comparing me to,” I say.
Her brow furrows, and I realize — too late — she thinks I am being unkind to her. Just then, the waitress comes back with our order, and when the clinking of plates and confusion of putting everything in its place is over, I feel awkward bringing up my silence again. When the waitress moves on, Serena picks up her espresso and turns to her side, facing the café as if she’s ending our interaction altogether.
“Excuse me for trying to make conversation,” she mumbles in between blowing on her coffee.
I could clarify that that isn’t what I meant, but something about what she just said irritates me. “Making conversation is what I tried to do when we were by the pyramid, but you wanted to get into the Louvre. Now, because I do not want to discuss weather, I am bad guy?” I may or may not be deliberately breaking my own English.
“I didn’t say anything about the weath —”
“Just because I do not talk so much, this does not mean I am not here. I think Americans must be, oh, what is the word” — I know what the word is, I don’t know why I’m pretending I don’t — “allergic to silence. You are scared of it. My father, when he calls me, he talks only about the weather, the price of airfare, what he should send me for Christmas. And he is spending money to do this, when he could be asking about …”
Despite the anger I’m feeling, I still can’t bring myself to finish that sentence. I look at the walls, at a framed photograph of a motionless, tranquil Seine River. I stare at it, as if I might be able to absorb some of its calm. I see the way Serena’s peering at me, as if she’s asking me, what is my problem?
I am being unkind to Serena, allowing a normal conversation to become “spirited” far too easily. Maybe this is a reflex, after Martine and all the impassioned arguments that were so frequent they became normal. Thinking of her seems to add weight to the cell phone in my jacket pocket. I expect I’ll see at least one missed call when I next check it.
Serena is still staring at me through the faint, spiraling curls of steam rising off her espresso. I get an urge to take her picture, but even I am not so dense about women that I cannot see this would be a bad idea. She makes a tut sound, looks down at the coffee. The silence is like an invisible hand on the back of my head, pushing it down. I do the only thing I know to do in awkward silences — I pick up my camera. I flick through the photos that I have taken so far today and try not to shake my head. It’s hard not to. There’s plenty of people in my photos, but maybe not enough of the city to make Monsieur Deschamps happy. And, looking at them, I don’t really know what their “stories” are.
I stop on a picture of Serena. She’s staring at a painting, and her eyes are bright and alive with … something.
I turn the camera to show her. “Do you know what you were thinking here?”
She is wiping her hands on a napkin after finishing her crêpe. She stares at the photo on the preview screen for a couple of seconds. From the way her eyes flicker, judder back and forth, I know that she’s trying to locate the memory. “I didn’t notice you taking this.”
“I am sorry.”
“No, it’s okay,” she says, never taking her eyes off the photo. “This was when I was looking at this painting, it was … Yeah, it was David holding Goliath’s severed head. Kind of gross, but it was one of the pieces in the Louvre that I actually got. I knew it would be something my dad would have liked. He loved stories like that — you know, combat and stuff? Heroism, underdogs … When I was little, he never read me girlish books about fairies or angels. He’d tell me stories about heroes and warriors — David and Goliath, Daniel in the Lions’ Den. This painting reminded me of him, of how it felt to be close to him. It was … a nice feeling.”
She stares into the distance for a second. Then she closes her eyes and shakes her head, as if resetting herself — not wanting to cry. She gestures at the camera, as if to ask if she can look through the pictures. I sit back in my chair. “Of course.”
The tension between us is draining away, and I am relieved. “I like some of these,” she says. “How long have you been interested in photography?”
This is actually not easy to answer, because — strangely — I do not get asked this question often. “Definitely since I was a child,” I tell her. “Mama says that I once told her I never wanted to forget anything for the rest of my life, and so I figured the only way to do that would be to take photographs of everything.”
“And you haven’t stopped since?”
“I guess not. Although, I do not take photos of everything anymore.” I feel a flush creep into my cheeks. I’m a little embarrassed by what I’m about to say, because I know it sounds kind of sappy. “I like to know that the memories are there for me. If I want to relive something, I can sort of do it, you know?”
I see her staring at me and know she has a follow-up question. But I don’t think my cheeks can flush any more without exploding, so instead I say, “So, Lara said you’re at Columbia, right? Have you chosen your major yet?”
She drains her coffee. Shrugs at me. “Physics … o
r Math. I’m still making up my mind.”
“That is your passion?” My face must show my surprise, because she rolls her eyes at me.
“Yes. People can get excited by things that aren’t artistic, you know?”
“I do, I do. Sorry, I did not mean to be insulting. What is it that you like about those subjects?”
“I like that, ultimately, your goal is to find an answer to a problem. And when you find it, the answer is the answer — it’s indisputable. Physics and Math aren’t messy. Well, Physics can be, but you know what I mean, right?”
I kind of don’t, but her eyes have a light in them now. I want her to keep talking, but she has turned her attention back to my camera.
“Are these all photos you’ve taken today?” she asks. I nod. “You’ve taken a lot — you like to leave your homework to the last minute, huh?”
I quickly take another bite of my crêpe, so that I couldn’t answer even if I wanted to. I can do nothing about the memory that marches through my mind, though. The memory of looking at exactly forty-four photos and realizing just how mediocre they are.
As I finish my crêpe, Serena’s eyes flash, showing interest, and I know instantly what she’s looking at … Before she has turned the camera around so I can see the preview screen, the blood is racing up into my cheeks, my shoulders hunching up by my ears, my eyes going back to that photo of the Seine on the wall. I feel like I could jump into it.
“Who is she?”
The photo is maybe a month old. Martine is reclining on the same chaise longue where Serena was sitting this morning. A shaft of light stabs through the dorm room window, turning her flame-colored curls into more of a blood-red, matching the tattoo she’d gotten the day before — a raven, suspended in flight, on the underside of her forearm.
I reach for the camera, but Serena leans back, holding it high and away from me. “Careful with that, please,” I tell her. “It is very expensive.”
“Is this your girlfriend?” she asks.
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