On my last morning in New York, lemon-colored light filtered in through the kitchen as I made coffee, the angry bleats of taxis and sighs of buses down below faintly audible. I tiptoed into the bedroom, collecting a few last articles of clothing and shoving them into my suitcase. As I zipped it closed, I looked over at Will’s lanky figure tangled in sheets, his face angelic with sleep. He looked so peaceful lying there that I didn’t want to wake him. A childhood spent on the move had made me weary of goodbyes. On my way out, I left a note on his shoes saying, Thanks for the unexpected fun. Inshallah, our paths will cross again someday.
2
MÉTRO, BOULOT, DODO
IF MANHATTAN IS where people move to jump-start careers, Paris is where they go to live out the fantasy of a different life, and that was exactly what I intended to do. Stepping out of the métro and onto the streets of Le Marais, I walked with my bulky red suitcase clunking behind me, pausing every few feet to ogle the sidewalk cafés, boulangeries, and vine-covered façades of my new neighborhood. Through a friend of a friend, I had been lucky enough to find a furnished studio to rent in an eighteenth-century building on rue Dupetit-Thouars. I rode the rickety, wrought iron freight elevator up to the third floor. As I unlocked the front door, the contrast between Canal Street and my new place made me want to dance on the doormat with joy. Light! Quiet! Privacy! Hardwood floors! An oversize pink bathtub shaped like a clamshell! The apartment couldn’t have been bigger than four hundred square feet but to me it seemed palatial, and it was all mine.
I spent the weekend getting settled in, unpacking, opening a bank account, buying new sheets, and scouring the kitchen. On Monday morning I took the métro to the law firm, which was located in an elegant townhouse adjacent to the Parc Monceau in the eighth arrondissement. A fleet of paralegals greeted me in the lobby, their heels clicking along the polished marble floors as they gave me a tour. I’d held all kinds of odd jobs from the time I was a teenager—dog walker, babysitter, personal assistant, double bass teacher, restaurant hostess—but it was my first time working in a corporate environment. The office had twenty-foot ceilings with elaborate crown moldings, gold-framed paintings, and a grand twisting staircase. The lawyers sat at their wooden desks, cigarettes in one hand, espressos in the other, which struck me as very French and very chic. At noon, a group of us went to a café around the corner for a languorous lunch and ordered steaks and two bottles of wine, expensed to the firm. When I returned, I was given a BlackBerry for work use and shown the supply closet. Equipped with a stack of bright yellow legal pads and sophisticated pens, I sat at my desk, feeling very grown-up as I leaned back in my chair and lit a cigarette, glancing around my new surroundings with glee.
Rather than taking the subway I decided to walk home after my first day of work. At dusk, the narrow, crooked alleys of Le Marais took on a medieval cast. The streetlamps sputtered to life, and as I wandered, I fantasized about the person I could now become. Gone were the friends who were not really my friends at all—just people with an appetite for mischief and late nights. Even the itch seemed to have subsided. With an ocean lying between me and all that, I imagined myself spending quiet, solitary weekends exploring the city, picnicking in the Tuileries Garden and reading a good book at a little café I’d discovered around the corner. I would get a bicycle with a basket that I would fill with groceries each Sunday at the outdoor market on Place de la République. I would start wearing red lipstick and heels like the other paralegals. I would learn to cook my aunt Fatima’s famous couscous and host dinner parties in my new home. Determined to spend less time talking about the things I wanted to do and more time actually doing them, I would sign up for one of the fiction workshops at Shakespeare and Company, the famous bookstore on the banks of the Seine. Maybe I’d even get a dog, a chubby King Charles spaniel that I would name Chopin.
But I didn’t have free time, and the few Sundays I made it to the market, the produce sat in my fridge until it mossed over with mold. Instead, I was thrust into a life that the French describe as “métro, boulot, dodo” (subway, work, sleep). By the end of my first week of work, it was clear to me that I was not cut out for a career in law. I preferred creative writing to spreadsheets, Birkenstocks to high heels. The firm specialized in international arbitration, which had sounded interesting to me at first, but whenever I tried to read the briefs that came across my desk, I found the legal jargon inscrutable, the content mind-numbingly tedious. The majority of my days were spent in the office basement, proofreading, printing, and collating thousands of documents into neatly organized binders so that the lawyers could help soulless corporations get richer. Expected to be on call 24/7, I slept with my work phone on my pillow and set alarms for the middle of the night so that I could check for urgent emails. Often, I didn’t get to leave the office at all; the paralegals pulled so many all-nighters that we began to keep score. On top of all this, I had a creepy boss who stashed catalogs of women’s shoes in his desk drawer and, when he thought I wasn’t looking, snapped photographs of my feet with his phone. After clocking yet another ninety-hour week, my way of letting loose was grabbing a pain au chocolat on the run and going out dancing. At the end of a late night out, I’d drag whomever I was with to an old jazz club called Aux Trois Mailletz, where we’d sing off-key at the piano and drink wine until our lips were purple.
* * *
—
My life in Paris was not the fantasy I’d imagined, but I began to concoct a different version. My correspondence with Will started unexpectedly, the short, hey-what’s-up-how’s-it-going text messages turning into long, quippy email exchanges followed by fat envelopes stuffed with handwritten letters and thoughtfully annotated New Yorker stories. Will sent me a postcard from a cabin in the White Mountains of New Hampshire where he’d gone away with friends for a weekend: No electricity, a wood-burning stove from the early 1900s, and no sounds but owls, crackling fire and the wind, he wrote. It made me want to travel the back roads of the US. Want to take a road trip? The idea of us driving together across the country made my heart do a little two-step.
At the bottom of our letters we always signed off the same way—no need to write back in equal word count—but our exchanges grew deeper and more frequent as the weeks and months passed. I read each of his letters over and over as if they were encrypted maps that offered secret clues and insights into the person holding the pen. I told Will about my wayward path since graduation and my new life abroad: I spent my first 36 hours in Paris in total solitude with my laptop and cell phone turned off. I walked all over the city, until the heel on my shoe broke and I had to take a taxi home. Despite my best attempts at a more ascetic life, I had picked up a new cast of friends—Lahora, a widowed yogi; Zack, an old college classmate who was training to be a mime; Badr, a young Moroccan businessman who loved to go out dancing; and David, an elderly expat who dressed like an international playboy and threw extravagant parties. You can’t force solitude onto a soul that needs to fly, Will replied. At such a line, how could I help but swoon?
I told Will about my dream of becoming a journalist and shared with him an essay about the Arab-Israeli conflict that I’d been laboring over for months. What a coincidence, he responded; he, too, had journalistic ambitions. He had recently taken a job as a research assistant to a professor and was hoping to find work as an editor, and he sent me thoughtful notes on how I might revise my draft. Despite our time together during my final week in New York, these small moments of connection came as a surprise, for it was only through letter writing that we began to really know each other, our old-fashioned correspondence offering a safer, more honest alternative to the cat-and-mouse games of dating. Soon, I grew so smitten with my new pen pal that he was all I thought about, dreamed about, talked about, anymore. I hoped that the person off the page might be as wonderful as the one conjured from ink.
* * *
—
It was a late-autumn afternoon, a rare slow
day at the office, and I was debating with Kamilla, the paralegal with whom I shared a desk, about whether I should invite Will to visit me in Paris. I wasn’t sure if the romantic subtext of our letters was in my head, but I worried that if I didn’t take the initiative soon, our correspondence would peter out. Over the next hour, I composed several different drafts of an email to Will, trying to strike the right tone, somewhere between earnest enthusiasm and detached cool. “Allez ma chérie, courage, at this rate you’re going to be here all night,” Kamilla said, pecking me on the cheek before heading out.
By the time I settled on a final version, it was dark out, the office nearly empty. I counted to ten, feeling more than a little immature as I dared myself to hit Send. When I finally worked up the guts to do it, I felt a thrill—only to have that quickly eclipsed by the anxiety of waiting for him to respond. Time seemed to trickle by. I smoked half a pack of Gauloises, I surfed the Web, I reorganized my desk. At nine, I finally took the métro home. I checked my email. Still nothing. I fretted as I fixed myself a dinner of Nutella-slathered toast. Had I overstepped or misread the vibe? Before bed, I would take a bath and then, if there was still no response, I would purge him from my head.
At midnight, I checked one last time. A message had arrived in my in-box. I opened it and discovered a forwarded flight confirmation. Destination: Paris, France.
* * *
—
Will arrived a little less than a month later, just in time for Thanksgiving. I spent the weekend before in a frenzy of preparations. I scrubbed the bathtub until it shone, swept the floors clear of dust motes, and hauled my sheets to the laundromat. I went to the Marché des Enfants Rouges and picked out a loaf of bread and a smelly wheel of Camembert, grabbed a jar of cornichons, sheets of charcuterie, and a bouquet of dried lavender. On the way home I bought some wine and, at the last minute, ducked into the salon across the street for a much-needed trim. On the morning of Will’s arrival, I rose at dawn and changed my outfit no fewer than six times before settling on my most flattering pair of jeans, a tight black turtleneck, and my good-luck gold hoops. By the time I set out for the airport, I was running almost an hour late.
A misty breeze swept across rue Dupetit-Thouars as the heels of my boots clicked hard and fast against the rain-slicked sidewalk. I was nearly at the métro when I heard my phone ping. It was a text from Will saying his flight had landed early and that he’d taken a taxi straight to my address; someone had let him into the building and he was waiting outside my apartment door. Hotfooting it back to my building, I took the steps two at a time, pausing when I reached the second-floor landing to compose myself. My heart was beating like a jacked-up metronome, my forehead was clammy, my breathing ragged. I had noticed in recent weeks that I seemed to get winded more easily. I made a mental note to look into a gym membership. Brushing my hair out of my face, I took a deep inhale and turned the corner.
“Hey, hey!” Will called out when he caught sight of me, his posture straightening and his face crinkling into a big, toothy grin. We hesitated for a moment before hugging, both of us suddenly too timid to attempt a kiss, even on the cheek. Wrapped in the arms of a man who was not quite a stranger but not much more than that, I felt, for the first time in months, that I was standing on steady ground.
“Bienvenue,” I said when we disentangled, and I ushered him inside. My studio was tiny and other than the kitchen and the bathroom, it was just one all-purpose room. “This is the bedroom,” I said, gesturing to the loft bed. “This is the living room,” I said, pointing to the bright red couch. “This is the dining room,” I said, showing him the old steamer trunk that also functioned as coffee table, desk, and cupboard. It was the first place I had ever lived alone and, although it was a bit spartan and I still hadn’t found time to buy curtains, I was proud of it. “And voilà!” I said, completing the tour as I threw open the big bay windows to reveal a small terrace.
“The best,” Will confirmed.
The rest of the day is hazy, and it comes to me in snapshots: the nervous chitchat in the living room as we drank coffee, the dozen individually wrapped gifts Will laid out on the trunk, the meandering stroll along the Seine, where we laughed at the sight of American study abroad students sporting berets and speaking terrible French. “Don’t even think about kissing me here,” I warned, as we crossed the Pont des Arts, where lovers affixed padlocks to the bridge’s grillwork. It was only later that night, after a bottle of red wine had loosened our nerves, that he did.
Will followed me up the ladder to the loft bed, a cheap, rickety affair made up of four wooden posts and a flimsy plywood platform that the previous tenant had assembled, dubiously. As we lay side by side, it felt different from those three nights we shared back in New York. A tender awkwardness filled the air as we undressed. Moonlight poured in through the window, turning the scars on my legs a silvery hue. Beneath us, the bedposts swayed.
“Damn you, IKEA,” I said.
“What if the bed collapses?” Will was genuinely concerned.
“Imagine my dad reading the newspaper headlines tomorrow: Naked American Couple Found Dead in Pile of IKEA Debris.”
Will jumped down the ladder—“One sec, I need to perform an evaluation.” He checked that the bolts were screwed in properly, wiggling and shaking the frame as I laughed. “A seismic evaluation!”
At the end of his two-week visit, Will returned to New York, but only to pack up his things and quit his job. He is moving to Paris to be with me—I wrote in my journal again and again until it began to feel real. As I sat on the métro on my way to work, a stupid smile stretched across my face. Joy is a terrifying emotion, don’t trust it, I added to the page. For under the joy, a storm was gaining speed, a roiling sense of foreboding, some wet, starless savagery unfolding beneath my skin.
3
EGGSHELLS
I HADN’T BEEN single for longer than a month or two since the age of seventeen. I wasn’t proud of this, and I didn’t think it was healthy, but that was how it had been. For the bulk of my time in college, I was in a serious relationship with a brilliant British-Chinese comparative literature major. He was my first real boyfriend and he took me to fancy dinners in the city and on vacation to Waikiki Beach, but as the semesters passed I grew restless, wishing I’d had more experience prior to meeting him. The summer before senior year, that relationship ended when I had a fiery fling with a young Ethiopian filmmaker. After that, it was a Bostonian I met while doing research over winter break in Cairo; he had a flair for grand-scale pranks and activism and had just been arrested for dropping a thirty-foot Palestinian flag down the side of one of the pyramids. A week later, as we drank bootleg whiskey at a bar overlooking the Red Sea, he dialed up his parents. “Meet the girl I’m gonna marry,” he announced, passing the phone to me before I could protest. I broke up with him not long after. Around graduation I started seeing the Mexican-Texan aspiring screenwriter. We dated for two disastrous months in New York while I interned and he waited tables at a trendy downtown hotel. He got mean when he was drunk, and he was drunk most of the time.
There was nothing casual about these relationships. When I was in them, I was fully in them, consumed by the idea of a life together. But even during the most intense periods, I was aware of an exit sign glowing faintly in the distance—and the truth was, I was always on the verge of running for it. I was in love with the idea of being in love. Another way to say it is that I was young: too impulsive and reckless with the emotions of others, too self-involved and focused on figuring out what came next for me to dwell on broken promises.
With Will, it was different. He was unlike any man I’d been with before. He possessed a bizarre combination of traits—part jock, part intellectual, part class clown—and could dunk a basketball just as effortlessly as he could recite verses of W. B. Yeats’s poems. I was taken aback by his thoughtfulness, by the way he was always intent on making everyone in a room feel
at ease. Five years my senior, he had a quiet, unassuming wisdom and playfulness of spirit that made him seem both far older and younger than his age. The moment Will returned to the doorstep of my Paris apartment, this time with an oversize duffel bag stuffed with all of his possessions, the exit sign disappeared from view. I was all in.
* * *
—
Will unpacked and folded his clothes into neat little stacks on the bookshelf I’d emptied to make room for his belongings. Rooting around in his duffel, he pulled out a portable speaker and asked if he could play some music. Nineties hip-hop, with Warren G on heavy rotation, boomed throughout the apartment. Laughter bubbled up inside of me as he rapped along to the lyrics and danced across the hardwood floor. He took my hand and spun me around the kitchen, nearly knocking over a frying pan.
“You’re distracting me,” I said, swatting him away with a dish towel.
I was making shepherd’s pie for lunch, wanting to impress Will with my culinary skills. With great concentration, I chopped carrots, sautéed shallots, browned meat, and mashed potatoes. Aside from scrambled eggs, the occasional bowl of pasta, and my go-to dinner of Nutella toast, it was the first dish from scratch I’d ever attempted, and I’d called my mom earlier that morning for the recipe. The kitchen was the size of a small utility closet, and without windows or a fan for ventilation, it was sweltering. I wiped my forehead with the dish towel and it beaded again as I layered all of the ingredients into a casserole dish and sprinkled a little cheese on top before putting the whole mess into the oven. Soon, the apartment smelled of butter and fresh herbs; it smelled for the first time like a real home.
Between Two Kingdoms Page 2
