It's Not Love, It's Just Paris

by Engel, Patricia

  Conversations in the House of Stars were a mishmash of dialects and linguistic collisions, flip-flops between French and Italian and Spanish, then to English to neutralize confusions, sometimes all in the same sentence. You’d think with so many of us speaking different languages there would be gaps in our communication, but it only expanded the banter. On the walk back from the party that night, Maribel revealed that Florian said that with her he’d felt a fléchazo, an arrow’s shot to the heart, which did not translate directly, and the closest evocative alternate we came up with was coup de foudre, because love at first sight is long-winded and corny in comparison, and Tarentina theorized that monolingual English-speakers are thus long-winded and corny due to their verbal confinement because people can only experience emotions for which their language already has a name.

  We convened in her bedroom with its own lounge area full of Moroccan pillows brought back from her frequent Marrakech holidays with the Musician, and ottomans surrounding a low table covered in liquor bottles and ashtrays. Sharif and Tarentina shared an ottoman and a joint while I kept to the edge of a lumpy purple sofa next to Maribel and Naomi. The couples—Loic and Dominique, and Saira and Stef—took to the floor.

  Sharif’s friend turned out to be his cousin, Cato, which Loic alerted “is not a French name.”

  “My given name is Felix.”

  “I think nicknames are a farce,” Tarentina shot back with an eye on me. “A Danish guy once called me Tina and I rammed my mobile into his crotch for taking liberties.”

  She threw her head back with laughter, one of her moves for flirting with the whole room, and everyone else laughed, too. But I felt Cato’s eyes fall my way.

  Sharif said his father was Moroccan, which is why he had an Arab name, but his mother would call him Serge in public and within certain circles. Depending on the company, he’d play the part of the little French boy or the little Maghreb son.

  “What does she call you now?” Naomi asked.

  “She doesn’t call me anything. She’s dead.”

  Everyone fell quiet, so Sharif told us the story of his parents’ meeting in “quintessential French form, at beach resort in Agadir.” She was a twenty-two-year-old university student on holiday with friends and he was a guitarist on the entertainment staff. Some girls exchanged glances and let out nervous, confessional laughter.

  “You see,” Sharif mocked them. “It’s a common story.”

  I looked to his Cato to see his reaction and saw his eyes were already on me, looking for mine.

  The night ended around four. Those of us who remained left to our rooms, while Sharif pressed up to Tarentina in her doorway, but she pointed him out with a finger to his chest.

  Cato waited for Sharif by the top of the stairs across from my room.

  “It was nice to meet you,” I said as I unlocked my door and stepped inside.

  “Same to you.”

  I had an instinct the moment could be unfolded and pushed myself to say more.

  “Do you live nearby?”

  “No, I live on the coast, a few hours north, but I’m staying on rue Vaneau for now.”

  That wasn’t more than two or three blocks away from Séraphine’s.

  “Are you on vacation?”

  He shook his head. “I came for a funeral. This morning.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry.” I felt like an idiot for asking.

  “It’s okay. It was my grandfather. He was one hundred and two. He was always complaining that he was bored with life. Nobody was as surprised as he was that he lived so long.”

  Sharif made his way down the hall toward us, giving a final glance back to Tarentina, but she had her boys she gave into and others she preferred to keep simmering. Cato’s eyes didn’t leave me as Sharif started down the stairs ahead of him. I waved good-bye and slowly closed the door between us but didn’t step away until I heard their steps fade into the foyer below and the creaky house doors push open and lock shut behind them.

  4

  We might have all been greenblood progeny, but I had a very different relationship to money than the other girls, who went on daily shopping sprees on Faubourg Saint-Honoré, or rue Cambon, where some boutiques even closed so Saira and Dominique could shop privately. The girls always tore off the tags before coming home because, Tarentina warned me, the maids had a habit of stealing from every girl in the house but Saira, because they were afraid of her father. When I went into a shop alone, which was rare enough, the sales people ignored me or followed me around, and not because they were looking to make a sale. My housemates teased me, called me a stingy sous pincher, but I thought that kind of wild spending is learned at home, along with the dreamy faith that a new outfit can have the power to change a life.

  Most of the other girls had never worked and didn’t plan on a career beyond the task of marrying well, but I’d always had jobs, whether packing boxes or answering phones in my father’s factory, bookkeeping for Raul the baker and Juanita the seamstress, or filing at Hector’s law firm. Our parents never understood the American way of kids going to summer camp or just loafing around waiting to get into trouble, and were deeply afraid our cushy lives put us at risk for being useless to society. Papi insisted we weren’t children of privilege but children of sacrifice. He said work made us honest, work made us human, and service was the rent we paid for the space we occupy on this planet.

  My father’s rule was always that the only free bed and free meal is at home. With my coming to Paris, he agreed to cover my rent, tuition, and food, but I’d have to work for anything extra. I imagined it would be easier to find work in Paris, but I quickly learned that the limitations on my student visa and the national deadlock on foreign workers made it impossible for me to find much paid work beyond under-the-table babysitting, housecleaning, or nude modeling like Giada did, though it earned her a thousand francs an hour. But Tarentina got me an audition as a candy-and-cigarette girl at a club owned by Gaetan, a former tennis pro turned nightlife impresario whom she dated her first year in Paris. I was supposed to roam the club strapped with a tray of smokes and lollipops, and I’d only earn tips, but at the last minute he assigned me to the coat check instead. I was expected to stay until closing at five in the morning, but the boss caught me dozing on the wooden stool in the corner sometime after three and told me I was not cut out for the nightlife after all.

  I asked Romain if he could find something for me to do at Far Niente, but he said I’d have to be at least Corsican if not a thoroughbred Italian to work there because the owner was a bloodhound for legitimacy. At the end of one of our Martin Eden afternoons, he took me to check out job offers posted on the bulletin board at the American Church and together we combed the FUSAC, circling ads looking for English tutors. I called a few numbers but every single person, upon hearing I was American, said they wanted to learn from a Brit because they preferred the accent. The one guy who did agree to interview me asked to meet me all the way in Porte de Montreuil. Romain and Loic both offered to accompany me but I decided to go alone, which in the end was a bad idea because the man, a white-haired Czech with a half-open pants zipper who seemed to speak English just fine, kept grabbing my thigh under the café table and saying smarmy stuff I was too embarrassed to repeat when I later reported to Romain.

  The only income I’d made in Paris so far was the five hundred francs Dominique offered me to write her a paper on the Fauvists for her contemporary art class—a bargain for her because the Sorbonne PhD she usually paid to do her papers charged two thousand a pop.

  Naomi’s boyfriend, Rachid, assured me he could find me a job at the Puces market where he worked weekends. The other girls said they wouldn’t be caught dead working at a flea market, except Naomi, who considered herself the most open-minded and democratic—the aspiring photojournalist who defied her Israeli parents by openly keeping an Arab lover, and who, before Rachid picked her up outside the Pompidou, had a brief affair with the young Senegali who sold fruits outside the rue du Bac métro
and another with one of the Cuban defectors who got paid to dance by the song at a Latin disco on boulevard Saint-Michel. There was no point in coming all the way to France just to date another muted square like the boyfriend she had at home, she proclaimed, or worse, waste her time being faithful to him when she had the chance to try on other lives through the men she met here in Paris.

  The morning after Florian’s party, Naomi and I made our way through the sleepy streets of Saint Germain and boarded the métro to meet Rachid at work. After transferring at the Saint-Lazare station, I leaned into my plastic seat, and a newly familiar face came into view beyond the Plexiglas window.

  It was Cato, standing across the tracks on the opposite platform still wearing last night’s clothes.

  I’d thought about him since waking up with the sunrise, touching the banister where he’d stood the night before as I descended to the dining room, taking my coffee alone while the rest of the house slowly rumbled awake.

  I’d thought of him as Naomi and I walked the cobblestones of our desolate block glistening from the street cleaners’ nightly rinse, picturing him hours earlier, making his way home after our shared night, not entirely sure how, since we’d only exchanged a few words, he had penetrated my consciousness.

  And there he was.

  “Look,” I pointed him out to Naomi. “There’s Cato from last night.”

  “Where?” She made a vague effort to look but was distracted by the old woman who’d boarded the train at Concorde and sat beside her, complaining in whispered English that she could smell her whole apartment down to the sardines and cornichons she’d probably left out on her kitchen counter.

  “There,” I said. I waved to him just as the train started vibrating forward, and to my surprise he waved back before our train rattled down the track into the dark tunnels.

  Naomi came to the Saint-Ouen flea market every Saturday, and the veteran vendors were used to the sight of the waifish American girl with the large camera hanging from her neck, with her pastiche French, hanging around the Egyptian boys. She led the way through the labyrinth of kiosks, barns, foldaway shops, the fortress of carpet shops, vendors of shoes, and leather goods, as streams of shoppers drifted through improvised aisles as if on a slow conveyor, behind every turn the start of another serpentine market row. Naomi told me about the boyfriend she left behind in New York, a boy she’d been with since tennis camp who expected to marry her upon graduation. I tried to see her as a young would-be bride, but only saw the Naomi she was now with Rachid, spending afternoons hanging around Les Halles, smoking his Gitanes, getting by on both ends of their broken Franglais.

  She brought us to the booth where Rachid and his friends sold Rai CDs, hats, and T-shirts emblazoned with FREE PALESTINE, GAZA RESISTANCE, and ILLEGAL OCCUPATION slogans, with red, white, green, and black flags whipping in the wind overhead. She’d been photographing Rachid for as long as she knew him, with an entire wall in her bedroom dedicated to her Rachid dans Paris oeuvre; photographs of Rachid and his friends working at Les Puces; Rachid performing his hip-hop-argot poetry at smoky clubs and cafés in Saint-Denis and Aubervilliers; Rachid at the boxing club training for night fights on the amateur circuit, Naomi documenting the subsequent broken noses, missing teeth, and eyebrow tears.

  “Lita!” Rachid grinned when he saw us. “I’m happy to say I’ve found you a job. A friend of mine needs a salesgirl at her antiques stall and she’s agreed to try you out.”

  We followed him down the path to the barns and he explained that she was an older Ukrainian woman who needed someone trustworthy and I had an honest enough face, but after our introduction it took only a minute of small talk for the lady to start apologizing to Rachid that the arrangement would not work out.

  “I can already tell she doesn’t have the personality to sell a thing,” she told him before turning to me. “I’m sorry. I can’t afford to lose money on you.”

  “You could at least give me a chance,” I said. “I’m a very hard worker.”

  She looked skeptical. “Have you ever sold anything before? Hand to hand?”

  I considered lying, but my pause was proof enough and she shook her head emphatically as I sputtered, “I can learn. I can learn to do anything.”

  “Rachid,” she was more clearly comfortable dealing with him than with me, “I need someone with experience. I know you understand. Explain it to her, yes?”

  “She speaks five languages,” Naomi came to my aid. “That has to count for something.”

  But the woman already had her eye on some potential customers fingering a small bronze statue of a lady petting a bear and waved her palm toward me indicating our meeting was over.

  Rachid found us a table in a tearoom carved out into a tent between furniture stalls. Our waitress couldn’t have been older than sixteen.

  “Look at that,” I said. “Why can’t I get a job doing what she’s doing?”

  “My friend,” Rachid dragged on his cigarette, “Don’t take it personally. Les Puces, like Paris, runs on connections.”

  “It’s kind of hard not to when they’re blaming your personality.”

  “It’s too bad you’re not Arab. I’d hire you myself but nobody is going to buy a FREE GAZA shirt from a Colombian girl.”

  “She doesn’t need to speak Arabic to take people’s money and give them change,” Naomi argued. “It’s mostly tourists around here anyway.”

  “Look around us, girls.” He motioned to the crowds swelling the flea market pathways, a mix of euphoric map-in-hand travelers, troupes of denim-clad teenagers, and hobby-haggling collectors.

  “People don’t come to the Puces for the merchandise. There is nothing in any of these stalls that anybody needs. People come for the experience of being sold to. They want conversation. They want smiles and charm. They want to feel like they’ve discovered a treasure, and they want a negotiating adventure as part of the show so when they take their little prize home and their friends ask, ‘Where did you get that?’ they have a passionate tale to tell. Nobody comes to the Puces for the junk we sell. They come here for the seduction. They come for the story.”

  “That’s a long way to go for a story,” Naomi said.

  Rachid laughed at her. “Look at you two girls. You came all the way to Paris, for what?”

  Naomi didn’t hesitate. “To get away from home. A long vacation.”

  “I came for education,” I said, though I didn’t even believe it myself.

  “Liars.” He shook his head. “For a vacation, you go to Club Med. And, for education, you could have stayed home. Both of you came to Paris for the same reason all these people come to the Puces. You came for a story.”

  My mother hardly traveled except for her charity missions back to Colombia delivering medicines and clothes she’d spend all year collecting. She and my father weren’t vacation types. If she were to go anywhere out of pure pleasure it wouldn’t have been Paris but to Lourdes, on one of those all-inclusive religious pilgrimages. Though she’d long ago defected from her gang of nuns, she remained an aficionada of the divine and made me promise that I’d visit a church up the road from the House of Stars at least once. She’d heard it was a real miracle factory and wanted me to add to the chain of prayers for my brother Beto.

  I didn’t like to talk about him. I wasn’t secretive but I’d read plenty of books on his condition, comparable case studies, and even took an additional minor in psychology hoping to understand him, though I’d never met another boy like my little brother, gloomy from the womb, never kicking, as if he didn’t care whether or not he was born. I’m not exaggerating. I hate exaggerations. Life is unbelievable as it is.

  She will never mention it, and I only know because I was five at the time and have been cursed with a very sharp memory: Beto’s birth almost killed our mother. He never smiled, never laughed, and barely played as a toddler. Mami thought maybe he was disabled, but he walked fine and spent his energy wiggling out of hugs, running away from us. He was born on a hunger
strike, too, and now, at fifteen, Beto was skinny like a girl before her period, with dim muscles and a curved spine, shadowy eyes and stringy veins pushing up through his temples. My father would warn you not to judge, say we’re all crooked in some way, and I loved my little brother, but love isn’t enough of a word in any language to describe what one feels for a sibling who can’t stand to feel life around him—a boy who, as a seven-year-old, turned blue and fainted at the dinner table because he drank laundry detergent before we sat down to eat. A year later, he tried to drown himself in the bath, so our father had the tubs taken out of the house, the swimming pool drained, and the windows bolted shut, fearing Beto’s entire existence was a suicide mission.

  My mother said Beto’s was an illness just like those of the sick kids in the orphanage she funded back in Leticia. Kids born missing limbs from contaminations, abandoned children with jungle diseases, born unwanted, which she said was the hardest malady to cure of all. Papi said when he was a kid he had every reason to want to curl up and die, but he heard the moon whisper to him at night that he had to wake up the next morning.

  They didn’t understand the monster eating their son, so they paid for every treatment available. Therapists, pills, art therapy, music therapy, sending him to a ranch for depressed kids, buying him whatever he wanted. Beto had a thing for rabbits just like Séraphine’s husband, Théophile, had a thing for cats. Our house was full of animals—five dogs and seven cats, all former strays, a blind parrot and six rescued horses that roamed the corral we once used as a soccer field—but the only thing that kept Beto going was the bunnies he kept in the atrium, which used to be a greenhouse for Mami’s tropical plants until Beto turned it into a free-range rabbit sanctuary because he didn’t believe in cages. Our parents indulged him because that’s what you do when you want to love someone into happiness.

  I found the church easily because of all the beggars out on the sidewalk. Even though there was no Mass, the pews were packed, heads hung in prayer, the altar before the blue-cloaked virgin lined with kneelers. A long painted banner on the dome above the altar said that whatever you asked for here would come true, and that’s probably why the place had such an impressive turnout. I got on my knees on my mother’s behalf because I knew she’d kill to be here, and what kind of skeptic would I be if I didn’t keep an open mind to prayer. Like my father says, the closest thing to faith is doubt.