Paris Was the Place

by Susan Conley

  Delphine is in my home. What to say? “Pablo is a delight.”

  “Pablo is good enough to eat.” She smiles at me for the first time. “Everyone always thinks so.” Both of us watch him get up and walk to the windows behind the table.

  Macon pours more coffee and goes into the kitchen. Why does he keep abandoning me at the table? “We have brownies,” he calls out. “I forgot that Pablo and I made brownies this morning at the house.”

  “I’m so sorry that your brother is sick,” Delphine says. “Macon has told me.”

  I don’t want to go to this place with her, so I close it off. Then she can’t take anything from me that I don’t want to give her. She’d like to keep Macon somewhere for her own—this is her nature. She may not even be aware she’s doing it. I don’t think she’ll ever stop trying. Not because she still loves him but because she can’t let go. I can tell this about her. It’s easy to read—the way possession comes so naturally to her. There’s a quiet tension over this in the room, but my fatigue makes me less attached to it.

  “Macon is always so happy to have Pablo here,” I say. “Thank you for coming.”

  “This is not easy for me.” She looks down at her lap. “I’ve worked on this.” On what? I want to ask. Worked on what?

  Macon’s never told me how beautiful she is or how boyish. Her hair is shorter than Pablo’s. “Come here,” she calls out in French. “Come to me.” Pablo runs to his mother and buries his head in her lap.

  Macon takes my arm then and walks with me back into the kitchen. “Surprise,” he says again.

  “Where did they come from, and why are they here? Delphine doesn’t seem very impressed by either you or me. What is happening?”

  “I wanted Pablo to come to dinner.”

  “And Delphine?”

  “She really wanted to meet you. She’s getting married to Gabriel, and that has something to do with her coming here. Though I’m not sure quite what. Pablo’s going to sleep over, and she’s going to leave. We’re going to go back out there and finish our lunch. Don’t let her scare you. Really. Eat the brownies. Then she’ll leave. We can do this together. We can face anything when it comes, no?” He kisses me and I let him. But my brain’s fogged by Delphine. She takes so much energy from me, just by being in the apartment.

  We walk out of the kitchen holding hands. Pablo devours his brownie. Then Delphine rises and moves toward the door. “It is time. I have to go back to Chantilly, and first I want to stop at the Louvre. Gabriel will be waiting for me.” She’s never anything but polite. She kisses Pablo’s head, and he goes back to his drawing. I open the door for her. “Good-bye, Willow.” She gives me an air kiss on each cheek. “Thank you, Macon, for the lunch. The brownies are not as good as they used to be, but they are still delicious.”

  As soon as the door closes, I laugh so loudly that it sounds like screaming. I run and flop on the couch, and Macon lies down with me and kisses my face and laughs into my hair. Pablo looks over at us from the table like we’re crazy. We’re safe from her. We have each other.

  LUKE CALLS ME later that afternoon. “We’re trying to come to dinner, but I don’t know what to wear.”

  “Wear anything. Just come.”

  Pablo and Macon are building towers with Legos. I climb up to the roof and sit in the noise of the city. Then I hear Sara and Rajiv downstairs. It’s the first time Sara has let Rajiv’s mother stay alone with the baby, or let anyone stay with the baby. Monumental for everyone. His mother has been dying to play grandmother, pressing and pressing. I climb down the ladder and kiss them both.

  “Look at your face!” Sara says. “You’re emaciated! Did you eat in India? And your hair. I’ve never seen it so long. Was it amazing?”

  “It was so good. It was intense.” I think of the soldiers by the side of the road and the sound of the gun. Then the hospital in Agra and Padmaja and her beautiful white hair. “Things happened. We’ll need more time for me to explain.”

  When I’d tried telling Luke and Gaird about the shooting in India, I’d sounded histrionic. Or like I was only worried about what could have happened to me. Which isn’t how it was. But when you’re a tourist and bad things happen, you’re still just a tourist. Still on the outside looking in. Maybe there’s no way to explain how it felt. Maybe I don’t even try.

  “Your beard!” Sara yells and laughs when she sees Macon. “You look like a mountain man!”

  “Well, that’s fitting because we were last in the Indian mountains.” Macon has the contented look he wears whenever Pablo is near. Then Sara takes Pablo’s hand. They go over to the couch, where there’s a small pile of picture books, and she begins reading one to him.

  Rajiv and I walk into the kitchen. My Indian cookbook is open on the counter. “First I wondered if we could make tandoori chicken chaat?” He nods and smiles and closes the cookbook.

  Then he says, “Now we will begin. Slice your chicken very thin.”

  He helps me with the spicy masala and puts extra chunks of mango in the chutney. Then we do aloo tikki with potatoes and the peas I’ve already boiled. He adds lots of cumin.

  Sara walks in. “Aloo tikki! Let me help!”

  We finish the food and bring it all up to the roof on trays to eat under the stars. Still no sign of Luke or Gaird. Pablo sits between his father and Sara. Paris stretches out as far as I can see—the dark river and the densely packed buildings under the punctuation of church spires.

  Gita, I pray silently as I sit down, if you’re out there, send word. Call me. Then I turn toward Macon and smile. She wouldn’t be in Paris, would she? She’s gone from this city.

  “To India!” Rajiv says, and we raise our beer bottles and clink.

  “What an amazing country it is,” Macon says.

  But where are Luke and Gaird? They’re so late. Macon goes down to the kitchen to get more rice. I follow him with two empty beer bottles in my hand. I drop one, and it smashes on the floor. Slivers of glass fly everywhere. “Shit,” I say. “Shit!”

  “It’s okay, Willie. It’s only a broken bottle. It’s not a big deal.” Macon takes the other bottle from my hand.

  “I knew Luke wouldn’t come.”

  “I really thought he would. Maybe dinner was a bad idea.”

  “No, it’s so nice. It’s good to see them. But I need to call Luke. I’ll be back up. I just want to see why he didn’t make it.”

  I walk into the bedroom and shut the door. Luke answers on the first ring the second time I call. “I was waiting for you,” I say.

  “Rajiv is there, right? God, he’s handsome.”

  “You didn’t come.” I close my eyes and listen to Luke’s voice. He sounds completely healthy. I miss him more than I can bear, and start to cry.

  “I was never coming.”

  For a moment, it’s as if he’s already left me. “You said you were figuring out what to wear.” I speak slowly.

  “Remember, I don’t have any T cells and I might catch a cold. I’ve got two bathrobes on and the comforter and Gaird is making me a hot toddy and I’m still freezing. How can I come to your dinner? It’s not possible. I don’t think I will be going anywhere. I have a fever. It started yesterday.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” Oh, God.

  “You’d just gotten back from India. I swore Gaird to secrecy. It’s only a fever.”

  “Track it.” I sound like my father. “Gaird should take your temperature every four hours.” I want to go see him right now. To make sure he’s still my brother. A living, breathing person. I can’t imagine that his death will ever become real to me, and I’m filled with guilt now for even thinking about it.

  “I know. I know.”

  “Have you talked to Dad yet?”

  “Every week.”

  “I mean, have you told him you don’t feel well.”

  “I haven’t put that on him, no. It’s hard to figure out what to say. I was hoping maybe you could. You’re good at that. Could you call him and tell him and then
maybe he’ll come and visit and you two can make up.”

  I refuse to believe things are so serious that I have to call my father. “Sleep now,” I say. “I love you.” I hang up and climb the ladder back to the roof and hear them all laughing.

  “Tell me about Lily,” Macon says to Sara. “What is she doing now?”

  “She’s talking.” Rajiv laughs. “Didn’t you know? She’s one month old and looks just like Sara and she’s speaking in full sentences.”

  “She is Rajiv’s long-lost twin,” Sara says. “She’s terribly sweet and only sleeps two hours at a time and I’m stark raving mad.”

  “Worse than residency?” Macon asks. Pablo is now sitting on Macon’s lap, moving one of the spoons through the air like a plane.

  “I don’t know what I’m meant to be doing differently.” Sara shrugs. “But she doesn’t sleep. She lies in the bassinet next to the bed, cooing. When she does that, I don’t care how many times she wakes up. It’s the shrieking that’s mind-rattling. But tell us about Dharmsala! You got the poetry manuscripts, Willie! You actually stole them out of the country in your backpack?”

  “Legally, Sara,” I say. “Sarojini’s daughter gave photocopies to me. I have a book I can write now.” We do another round of toasts for the book, but I miss my brother. Rajiv tells Sara to explain how they gave baby Lily her first bath in the kitchen sink. I smile at my friends and lean back in my chair. I’ve missed them. But the dinner feels forced without my brother—like too much of a good thing.

  I know we’re each dealt different luck in our lifetimes, but Luke’s got a bad hand. How is it that I can eat this meal? Or laugh at Rajiv’s jokes? Is this how we try to forget? Or how we keep on living when the people we love most can’t get out of bed? Sara tells us the story of Lily’s bath, and I’m grateful to listen to her because I can’t talk. And I was wrong. I can’t eat the meal either. I feel sick. Sara knows. She gets what it means that Luke hasn’t made it to dinner. Her story about Lily’s bath is a small act of generosity. A tiny one. She’s distracting all of us from the sad, sad fact that one of us has gone missing.

  32

  Drought: a long dry spell

  It hardly rains in Paris in August. The grass in the parks and the trees and gardens all suffer in the drought. But Luke loves it. He’s a sun worshipper like my mother. He starts coming in a cab to my apartment to sit on my roof and soak up the heat. He’s not working much. I love having him up there while I read through the Sarojini papers at the table. I’m taking his cues. And he and I seem to have a tacit agreement not to talk about his disease. His breathing has gotten shallower, which makes me worry about the yeast infection, and he doesn’t want to eat much, but he’s getting out. He’s steady. The high fever he had back in July has subsided. Gaird tested negative for HIV. The disease is only more mysterious to me. They’re planning a trip to Ibiza with Andreas and Tommy. Gaird says he’ll cook feasts in an old house Andreas’s family owns in an olive tree grove. Luke says he’ll plant himself on the beach and absorb enough sun to last him through the Paris winter.

  In the middle of the month Macon and I go see an ob-gyn in a gray brick hospital in the sixteenth. We want to make sure there isn’t scarring from the miscarriage. The doctor is an older French woman in brown suede heels with hair in a chignon. She is gentle and self-assured and tells me everything is fine—there’s nothing unusual at all about a first miscarriage, or even a second or third. She says the woman’s body is just getting ready. When she walks me out to the small waiting room, she takes off her bifocals and they hang on a long, beaded chain around her neck. She turns to Macon and tells him she’s certain I’ll get pregnant again very soon, and he smiles boldly when she says this.

  We leave her office hand in hand and walk out of the hospital—it’s set on elaborate grounds with tall, clipped green hedges and finished rosebushes and a pathway through a small stand of maple trees, all of which makes me think of some old-fashioned sanatorium. Macon repeats the doctor’s words: “Pregnant again very soon.” Then he smiles at me, more shyly now, like he’s taking in what the doctor’s just said. The miscarriage is already a distant thing. I’m not ready to be pregnant—my mind’s too distracted. My body’s too remote. I know it isn’t time yet for us to be thinking about a baby. But I squeeze his hand, and we walk through the ivy-covered gates of the hospital, back onto the one-block lane called Rue de Noisiel, not so far from Luke’s apartment.

  We can get to Avenue Victor Hugo on foot from here. At five in the afternoon, the summer gloaming is rich and distant from the ache of autumn. Tonight the dusk is speckled and thick—the skin of a Bosc pear or some other fruit you can hold in your hand. Luxurious even. It feels like it will always be August. Always French sandals and café tables outside. Always this reprieve.

  We stop at a boulangerie and buy cheeses and an imported prosciutto. Then stop again, for good red wine. We bring it all to Luke and Gaird’s and lay it out on their little table by the living room windows. Then the four of us eat. We don’t talk about fevers or AZT. We talk about Ibiza; they leave in a week. Luke says, “There is the most incredible olive oil there to drench your bread in. And the stone patio at the house overlooks a cove with water the most spectacular shade of blue.” Gaird smiles at him so warmly. It’s almost as if Luke is describing Fantasy Island—but they have plane tickets. And he’s strong enough to go. The sun does him such good. Restores him and warms his bones. They can’t get to Ibiza soon enough.

  Macon and I take the metro home from Charles de Gaulle. Tomorrow we’re driving Pablo to Sara and Rajiv’s to meet the baby. We’ll pick him up in Chantilly, then loop back to Sara’s. Then we’re all going to the Bois de Boulogne for a picnic. We get off the train at Place Monge and walk home. Macon says, “Pablo’s always wanted a baby sister, you know. He’s made Lily drawings—a series of portraits of Sara and Rajiv and you and me as zoo animals. He says he wants the baby to know all his family.”

  I stare at him in the light from the streetlamp on Rue de la Clef. “He said that? He said I was part of your family?”

  “Yeah, he did. Because you are.” He kisses my hand. “Family is a malleable thing for a five-year-old. It’s about who he trusts. Who is safe. Who he can tell really loves him.”

  GAIRD AND LUKE NEVER GET to Ibiza. Two days after our visit with them, there’s a faculty meeting at the academy. We’re all sitting in the wood-paneled conference room at the end of the second-floor hallway when Luelle knocks and leans in and hands me another note. This time, I know. This time, my heart sinks. I squint at her tiny handwriting.

  i’ve fallen and i can’t get up

  No instructions or explanations. It’s the ad on TV.

  “Can you believe this shit?” Luke yelled when he’d first watched the ad in Montana. I was making myself drink the warm Riesling at Aunt Happy’s house after we’d left Dad at the cemetery. I knew I’d crossed a line with him by yelling at him, and I wanted the wine to soften things. Luke lay on the braided rug with his glass and watched the TV. The woman in the ad fell on the floor. Then she spoke into some kind of chain around her neck that had a remote-control device, which alerted an ambulance. “Could they try any harder,” Luke said, “to make a really terrible ad?” We’d both been fascinated. We stayed up and watched the ad two more times, outlasting everyone else at Aunt Happy’s—even Dad, who came home and went to bed in the guest room, without talking to either one of us.

  i’ve fallen and i can’t get up

  I stare at the note. I’m not calm. Some of the faculty members are new this fall. They don’t know me. Or anything about my life. I’m the poetry professor to them. But I have friends in this room, too. “Polly,” I say, and I lean over to her, weeping. She’s in the drama department. She’s someone I trust. “I’ve got to go.” She nods understanding that this has something bad to do with my brother.

  This is our agreement. If Luke falls down, he’s meant to call me at school and go to the hospital. I run down the staircase and out to
Rue St. Sulpice, and I jog all the way to Boulevard St. Germain before I find a cab. When I get to the ICU, there’s an orderly mopping the concrete bathroom in Luke’s room, wearing a face mask. An IV line is back in Luke’s left hand, and an oxygen mask sits over his mouth. I back out of the room to go find someone who knows something, and I see the plastic bag on the floor attached to the catheter, the small drip of dark urine already collecting. At the nurses’ station I flip through the French in my mind. It’s crucial to win the nurses over.

  “Excusez-moi, madame?” My voice comes out in a rasp.

  A tall nurse with short dreadlocks stands behind a wooden counter. She’s wearing baggy scrubs and has a clipboard in her hand. “What can I help you with, dear?” she says in English.

  “Luke Pears,” I whisper. My voice is gone. “The patient in room 212?”

  Sara comes down the hall. Her maternity leave isn’t over yet. “Gaird called me. I came right in. I’m so sorry.” Then she leads me away by my elbow. “Luke has an intestinal blockage. It accounts for a large part of his pain. It can be really bad. It’s probably the reason he fell down in his apartment. But the candidiasis is obstructing his ability to breathe. This is the infection we’ve been dreading. The most important thing now is to manage his pain.”

  Morphine allows him to sleep that whole first day. I pull a chair over to the side of the bed and watch him. The room is canary yellow this time, and the prints are close-ups of red poppies. Gaird sits in the matching chair on the other side, holding Luke’s free hand. Macon comes and goes, bringing cheese and fruit and water.

  I step into the hall and find the pay phone near the nurses’ station. Then I dial the house in Sausalito. I’ve gone too long without talking to my father. Now I have no choice.

  My father answers on the second ring. “I found you!” I yell into the phone. All this time, it was this easy to reach him.

  “And who might this be?” He sounds more polite than I remember.