It's Not Love, It's Just Paris

by Engel, Patricia

  “Oh, I haven’t met her yet.” I said.

  “That’s because she’s gone,” Tarentina answered. “Tania lived in your room before you. She was here three years but she kept failing out of schools, so her parents finally made her go home to Istanbul.”

  “I heard she’s getting engaged soon,” Dominique informed them. She’d run into a friend of a friend in Porto Cervo who’d heard it from someone else, which led to resounding gasps.

  “The bitch could have told us,” Tarentina said. “Let’s see if we’re invited to the wedding.”

  “If there’s a wedding,” Camila added because Tania had apparently left a devoted boyfriend behind in Paris.

  “I’ve never seen a guy love a girl the way he loved Tania except”—Giada turned to Saira—“except maybe the way your Stef loves you.”

  Saira had grown up in Geneva, and her family owned a staffed apartment on rue Royale, but Saira preferred to live in the house so she could continue seeing her boyfriend, her Stef, as Giada put it, a Belgian race-car driver who’d recently dropped out of the Formula One because of vision problems. Saira’s family disapproved of him and only let her live in Séraphine’s place because of the No Boys Allowed policy, though I quickly observed that the rule, like most of the others, was purely decorative, and Stef spent nearly every weekend in Saira’s room.

  “Stef’s the only man in the world who is actually dying to get married,” Dominique told me, but I was distracted by her heavy makeup and what looked like a pound of diamonds dripping from her ears, wrists, and in a heart-shaped pendant around her neck. “He proposes to her every other day.”

  “Only because he knows I’ll never say yes,” Saira laughed. “It would kill my father, and if not, my father would kill me.”

  “What about you, Lita? Did you leave a boyfriend back home?” asked Maribel, who’d moved from her breakfast to hand-rolling a cigarette on the tablecloth.

  “No …”

  “Are you sure?” Tarentina looked skeptical.

  “No. I mean, no, there’s nobody.”

  But there had been somebody. From long before. And he wasn’t home but somewhere else, far away. Daniel. He was our Jordanian neighbor Abel’s nephew and a surrogate son since Abel never married or had children of his own, living alone in his big modern eyesore of a house in our neighborhood of Dutch colonials and Tudors, always redecorating except for summers when Daniel came to visit and, finally, when Abel paid for him to transfer to college in New York. Daniel wanted to marry young, as both our parents had, though at nineteen I told him I wanted to wait, to know myself better, to build a life of my own before merging it with someone else’s. But he’d insisted there was nothing I wanted to do on my own that we couldn’t do together and that we were already practically family—Abel and my parents had adopted each other in exile and spent every holiday together. He believed that was enough. Eventually Daniel’s parents started pressuring him to go back to Amman and leave me behind.

  He didn’t know my marrying him would not have been without controversy. My parents tolerated our premature romance because they’d known Daniel since he was a child. They understood and trusted Abel’s influence; they could all keep an eye on us and chase him off if he ever became too much trouble. But my older brother, Santi, warned that if I married Daniel now or ever, our inherited culture, which hung by a second-generation thread, would fade to a more convenient English. Paternal heritage would dominate because Santi said patriarchy always wins, and I, as a daughter, needed to marry a full-blood Colombian like our father or at least an hijo de La Gran America, like us, with a foot in two lands, the product of our parents’ great migratory experiment.

  Santi held a practical policy on romance and wouldn’t date a girl he wasn’t willing to marry if she happened to become pregnant. I sometimes wished I could be that way. Especially when Abel told me Daniel was engaged to a Kuwaiti girl who’d been selected and endorsed by his parents because she came from a respectable Maronite family. Then I received a letter from Daniel saying he didn’t really want to marry her even though she didn’t have problematic ambitions like mine. He swore he’d love me into the next life. He swore we were eternal. I only wrote back, “Fuck your eternal,” because I can be very mean when I make the effort, especially to people I love.

  Maribel held her lighter to the hand-rolled tobacco stump on her lips.

  “Don’t worry, Lita. There’s a collective amnesia that sets in after a few weeks in this city. If there is somebody, you’ll forget him soon enough along with everything else that came before. How long are you here for anyway?”

  “A year.”

  “Just one year?” Naomi was incredulous. “What’s the point in coming if only for a year?”

  “She can always change her mind,” Dominique insisted. “That’s what I did. And now I’m on my third with no plans of leaving.”

  “I’ve got to go back home in June,” I said.

  “It’s easy to get a visa renewal. My father’s got a good friend at the American embassy. Remind me to put you in touch,” Camila offered, as if that were the problem.

  “It’s the agreement I made with my family,” I said, which left the others staring at me. “I have to go back.”

  I was grateful when Saira finally spoke.

  “I’m going to Avenue Montaigne for some shopping this afternoon. Anyone want to join me?”

  Giada and Dominique said they would. Tarentina took over, talking about her last trip to Marrakech with the Musician and how she’d run into a Swedish girl who lived in the House of Stars years earlier in the middle of Djemaa el Fna, turning the conversation into a string of anecdotes about their escapades, sketches of ways they’d uncovered their Paris together, making it clear that I was still as invisible as they wanted me to be, and there was a code to this house that was still beyond my grasp.

  My classes at the language institute were full of expat wives who’d leave early for lunch dates, dilettantes on perennial student visas, and distracted businessmen who alternated between taunting and flirting with the young teacher. I soon started forgoing class for afternoon excursions with Loic, who was always ready to teach me something like that the Louvre was not only a great museum but also served as a popular destination for making out and express public screwing, as it had been for him and his friends as teenagers. He said they’d sip from flasks sewn into their denim jackets, get drunk in front of the Poussins or in the caryatid room, fondle each other between the Canovas, roll joints and smoke beside the Sleeping Hermaphrodite, and somehow never get caught.

  It wasn’t my first time at the Louvre. I’d navigated the galleries as part of a teen tour squadron when I’d won a scholarship to a summer language program: two weeks of Italian in Alberobello, two weeks of French in Fontainebleau, and two weeks of Spanish in Valencia, though when I returned home with a Castilian accent, my mother threatened to smack the conquerors’ lisp out of me. But Loic taught me that if you wait until the late-afternoon tourist exodus, when they flood out of the museum into the dusty gravel of the Tuileries with exhausted enchantment, queuing up to buy Eiffel Tower miniatures from the Africans along the path, the museum staff is so worn from the masses that they’ll wave you right in, past the security checkpoint, and won’t even make you pay.

  “Always go through the Richelieu or Sully wings, where the guards rarely check for tickets,” Loic instructed as he led me through the great hall beneath the glass pyramid, “and if they do stop you, act as if it’s your first time in a museum and you had no idea it wasn’t free.”

  And he was right. We passed through without interruption, wandering up to the front salons of Sully where you can see through the Carrousel du Louvre across the labyrinths, past the Grand Palais down to La Défense on the horizon.

  Later, when we emerged from the museum into the amber dusk, Loic stopped under the Carrousel arc to light a cigarette. I saw Gaspard walking a few meters away, recognizing him from the times we’d passed each other in the courtyard
and he’d never offered more than a nod, always dressed in the same tired chocolate corduroy pants and black-and-white wingtip shoes. He was wispy in build like Loic with the same overbred floppy facial features, and though three years younger, he was terribly aged and wore a permanent old man’s scowl.

  “Look, there’s your brother.”

  But Loic struggled to catch a flame with his lighter, and by the time he looked up Gaspard and his wingtips had already slipped into the hedges of the labyrinth.

  He finally caught a burn on his cigarette and, when we were passing through the Porte des Lions corridor, asked, “Are you close with your brothers, Lita?”

  “I’m close with both of them but they’re not close to each other.”

  “Something about brothers.” He drew in a mouthful of smoke.

  I nodded, though in the case of mine, it was because there were ten years between them and I was right in the middle, five years younger than Santiago, five years older than little Beto.

  “Where is your mother?” I asked. I’d been wondering.

  “Los Angeles.” He said it mockingly. Loss Angeleez.

  “What’s she doing there?”

  “I don’t know. A man, probably. Before Los Angeles it was Buenos Aires and, before that, Hong Kong. Always chasing men around the world, until they get tired of her and then she finds someone else. After our father died she had a breakdown. When she came out of the hospital my grandmother suggested she go visit an old friend in Rome to recuperate, but she met a man there and didn’t come back until Théophile’s funeral six years later.”

  “Do you ever see her?”

  “The last time was four years ago. She was in Paris a week before she came by the house. I call her sometimes. She always says she has so many problems, so many pressures. ‘Oh Loic, my life is so complicated,’ but she never asks how I am. Never. She’s waiting for my grandmother to die so she can claim her inheritance.”

  Loic threw the nub of his cigarette into the street as we stepped onto Quai Voltaire. “I feel worse for my grandmother than for myself or for my brother.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Nobody deserves to be abandoned by their own child.”

  “Or by their own parents,” I said, thinking of my own mother and father, but by the way he looked at me and nodded, I realized Loic thought I’d meant him.

  We didn’t speak the rest of the way home but I didn’t mind. I’ve always thought sharing silence is how you really get to know someone.

  Most of the girls had boyfriends, but in between romances, the girls had Romain. The maids called him Le Coq du Village. The girls called him The Corsican, holding him apart from the other waiters at Far Niente, the Italian restaurant on the corner of rue de Sèvres, who often stopped at our house for nightcaps after their shifts. Romain was a highly recommended bedmate, known as much for carrying high-grade hashish as for his Bambi lashes, that crown of gelled brown curls, a misty bronze complexion, and left cheek mole like the one Séraphine said she painted on in the forties.

  I started joining the girls for dinner there, and on slow nights, Romain would stand at the edge of the table and share pieces of his life with me—how he came to Paris from Calvi by way of Marseille and was saving his sous to move to New York. He wanted to be an actor. “The French Daniel Day-Lewis,” is how he put it.

  “I want to study at Lee Strasberg like Newman and Pacino. I want to play all types of persons. Spanish, Russian, or Arab. I have the face for all these things,” he said, touching his chin. “I don’t want to be only a French actor. I want to be an actor of the world.”

  When he stepped away to tend to some other customers, Tarentina leaned across the table toward me.

  “I’ve known him three years and never heard him speak so much, not even in bed, and that’s where guys usually get around to spilling their dreams.”

  I shrugged. “I grew up with brothers. I’m used to hearing boys blab about themselves.”

  “I don’t think he’s looking at you in a sisterly way,” Naomi said.

  “I wasn’t flirting with him.” I must have sounded defensive because the other girls started laughing.

  “On the contrary. You’re a terrible flirt,” Tarentina put me in my place.

  “With no presence whatsoever,” Camila added with squinty eyes and a thread-thin grin, as if judging me for a pageant.

  Tarentina reached for the wine bottle at the center of the table, topping off my glass with what was left.

  “That’s precisely what is so brilliant about it, my dear Lita. Your charm is that you’re charmless.”

  The other girls found this hilarious and I forced myself to join their laughter. I wanted them to think I had a sense of humor about myself.

  “Romain was the first guy I slept with in Paris,” Naomi said, suddenly nostalgic, and Maribel and Giada chimed in that he was their first in Paris, too, though only Naomi had ever been to the apartment in Gobelins he shared with a Polish housepainter.

  I watched him across the restaurant as they went on comparing bed notes about Romain and the other waiters. The other customers had cleared out and the music was louder now. I saw a homeless man with a dragging leg in the doorway of the restaurant, careful not to step inside, waiting until Romain noticed him. Roman gave a smile and wave before slipping into the kitchen and returning with a wrapped plate of food for the man, who nodded appreciatively but never spoke before rushing off. It wasn’t the first time I’d witnessed this ritual, though the other girls never seemed to notice, but that night I pointed it out to Dominique. She gave a quick look and said, “Oh, that’s the mute who begs in the Babylone métro,” before cutting back to the discussion of the waiters as lovers: Giancarlo, the stocky tanned one with the tiny hoop earring was in the lead for endurance, but Maribel had snooped through his wallet once and found a photo of a child he later admitted was the son he’d left behind along with a wife in Bonifacio. Franco, the blond from Verona, was Dominique’s favorite, blond and frail like Loic. Lorenzo from Palermo was a tender and generous bedmate but all of them agreed that Romain was the best lover of them all.

  Where I came from, mothers tell little kids that babies are freshly baked angels that fall from the sky and sex is meant to be personal and private like prayer. But Tarentina, especially, spoke of sex as openly as sport or philosophy, with proclamations that the greatest moment of the act isn’t the orgasm but the five seconds before, and she wanted to live all her life that way, on the verge of being satisfied.

  That night, the Far Niente guys came off their shift and joined the girls for a smoke and drinks in Giada’s room. They called down to my room for me to join but I only got as far as the doorway, with Maribel rolling about on the floor, laughing with Dominique and waiting for her turn on the bong in Naomi’s small hands. Tarentina was by the window gesticulating one of her wild monologues to Giuseppe the lanky Venetian. He pretended to listen, slowly slipping his hand into the butt pocket of her jeans, inching his pelvis closer to hers, and I thought if the girls had compared them as lovers, the boys had probably done the same.

  Romain was stretched out on the floor, glossy eyed, blowing smoke rings to the ceiling. He motioned for me to come in but I shook my head and returned to my room to write a letter to my little brother.

  A few moments later, Romain was tapping on my door frame.

  “You have Tania’s room,” he said in English, looking around and then at the bed, as if he’d been there many times before.

  “I know.”

  “She was more messy than you. And not as nice.” He smiled big as if it were a much bigger compliment than it sounded.

  “I heard she’s getting married, in case you care.”

  “I don’t, actually.”

  “Okay.” I turned back to my letter.

  “Oh, Lita. I frustrate, you know. I hear you speak English so easy and so nice and I frustrate. I want to speak like you. Tell me the truth. Is my English terrible?”

  “Not at all.”
He had that French tick of tagging uh to every other word. “You just need to practice.”

  “But everybody I know speak more bad than me.”

  “Read to yourself out loud in English,” I said. That was how my mother and I helped new arrivals and their children shed their accents. “It will help you loosen your tongue and feel the sounds on your lips.”

  “You make it sound sexy.” He rubbed his neck against the door frame, catlike.

  I shook my head, in case he was getting ideas.

  “Why you say no when I don’t yet ask you what I want to ask you?”

  “No, your English is not terrible, Romain.”

  “I want to ask you to help me read like you say. I practice in front of you. You tell me when I do mistakes. Learn me words I don’t understand.”

  He came close enough to take my hand as if he were asking me to dance.

  “I pay you of course. Not a lot but I pay you something.”

  I thought of all the people back home I’d helped sound out letters until the words flew off their lips, how my own parents had once struggled with those foreign tones.

  “I’ll help you, Romain. And I’d do it for free.”

  He swiped a tattered copy of Martin Eden from the Lost & Found at the American Church, and a few days later we sat across each other on my bedroom floor as he read slowly but with an actor’s precision, his brows like pointed arrows, features smooth and chiseled. I liked watching him. His thick thigh muscles creased through his jeans, bulging knees, square shoulders, perfectly erect posture under a tight ribbed sweater. He’d played in a soccer league in Corsica and even tried out for the professional clubs in Paris but wasn’t good enough. He and his older brother came to Paris together, but his brother cried every night for three months until he finally went home to run the family butcher shop with their father.