It's Not Love, It's Just Paris

by Engel, Patricia

  When I left Cato that day in the Rodin Museum gardens, the memory that came to me was of years spent training to fight on a punching bag, only to emerge beaten and defeated, nursing my bruises alone.

  When I got back to the house, Loic was perched on the front steps as he often was, waiting for someone, anyone.

  “Why are you crying?”

  “I’m not crying,” I rubbed my eyes. “It’s the pollution.”

  I sat next to him sucking on a cigarette like a pacifier, the last scraps of afternoon sun tucking away into an early evening chill, confessing everything.

  “Forget him,” Loic advised. “You’ll find someone else. A local, not some country mouse.

  Tarentina later tried to console me by saying Cato had probably been interested in me only because French boys think dark girls give spectacular blowjobs, and when I didn’t produce he decided to move on. A few of us lounged in her room waiting out the afternoon rain with cigarettes and coffee the maids had brought up with cookies on a silver tray. Tarentina was stretched belly-down on her bed talking about how she could write a book on the sexual tastes of European men—not a memoir but a manual filled with anecdotes from her years of fieldwork.

  “Why don’t you then?” I asked her.

  “What for? Nobody reads books anymore.”

  But Naomi countered that Rachid and his friends said the paler the girl, the looser the panties.

  “That’s because everyone knows gringas are easy,” Camila sneered.

  “There is no easier girl to get into bed than an upper-class Italian,” Dominique argued, and I thought Giada might take offense, but she instead offered that it was common knowledge that the girls most liberal with their bodies are the ones from current or former Communist regimes.

  “You see, Lita,” Tarentina explained, as if I were the last to know, “there are two types of lovers in Paris: the incurable romantics on the quest for love and those in pursuit of the exotic fuck. The problem is when these two objectives collide, as they seem to have done in your case. Am I right, girls?”

  She looked to the others, who nodded in agreement and back at me.

  “All that cross-cultural dabbling is fine for a casual affair. But in matters of love, the wise ones know it’s best to stick to your own kind.”

  “That sounds kind of narrow-minded.”

  “Perhaps, but it’s true. Count your blessings, darling, that he didn’t stick around long enough for you to form any real attachment.”

  I felt all their eyes on me.

  “For the love of God,” Tarentina howled, “you saw him three times in your life!”

  “Four,” I corrected.

  She rolled her eyes, groaning, “Of all the pretty boys in Paris, you had to set your sights on de Manou Junior. That is some incredibly bad luck.”

  I had no idea they already knew about Cato’s father, but I learned you couldn’t stop gossip in that house.

  “I don’t know what you mean,” I said, but from the way Tarentina stared back at me it was clear Séraphine must have recounted every word of our conversation.

  “Let me just say what everyone in this room already knows, Lita. He could never be with you in any meaningful way and it’s obvious that’s the only way you want it.”

  “He’d be laughed out of France,” Camila added with an octave of pleasure. “He’s probably already got a girlfriend anyway. A de La Rochefoucauld type.”

  “I’m sure he’d be up for a fling,” Giada said, trying to sound supportive. “But you’d have to know it’s like buying a pair of shoes, taking them home, and realizing they’re just not you.”

  “I’m supposed to be the pair of shoes?”

  “It’s not you, Lita,” Tarentina tried more gently. “You just couldn’t have found anyone more terminally French than the son of Antoine de Manou, and you couldn’t be any more of a foreigner. What you need now is an interim lover to keep you limber until you find your next affair. Why don’t you try Romain? He’s always hanging around you with that reading nonsense. And he comes highly recommended.”

  She and the other girls traded knowing smiles.

  “Has he ever made a pass at you?” Camila asked me.

  I admitted he hadn’t. But as much as I enjoyed the sight of Romain and his lean cross-legged thighs on my carpet, reciting Jack London, he hadn’t captured my imagination. The one who lingered in my subconscious before I fell asleep at night was Cato, the picture of his silhouette walking through the dark rain, watching me from across an otherwise desolate street.

  “Oh, girls,” Tarentina sighed, “we’ve obviously lost this one already.”

  I was relieved they’d stop bullying me with their wisdom, but Tarentina offered one last thought.

  “There should be a sign hanging over the front door of this house for every girl to see the moment she arrives.”

  “Saying what?”

  “It’s not love, it’s just Paris.”

  Maribel was often depressed due to Florian’s unwillingness to leave Eliza. She’d spend a string of nights at the studio followed by a week as a bedbound slug with Florent Pagny’s Savoir Aimer playing on repeat in her CD player, until Florian appeared at the House of Stars pleading through her closed door and she’d finally let him in. I’d hear them through the thin wall that separated our bedrooms, the sound of weight shifting on her metal bed frame, the headboard slamming against the plaster wall, the sound of promises—his telling her he loved her and her inevitable desperate questioning growing louder and louder, “Then why won’t you leave her?”

  That week he had a new policy of non-response. Tarentina said it was meant to keep her hopeful, and hope needs very little fuel. She called Maribel an idiot for making demands. She said only the stupidest women think an affair can exist anywhere outside the bedroom. She’d been with the Musician for years already, and his wife had yet to catch on. He wasn’t the only married man on her roster, either, but Tarentina was as discreet as a tomb, and her men knew this, which always kept them coming back.

  “To be a successful mistress,” she advised, “a girl must remember the relationship comes without ownership. Love and jealousy are symptoms that the affair has expired and it’s time to gather your things and walk away.”

  She compared an affair to one of Maribel’s paintings, saying no matter how obsessed she became with a piece, there always came a day when she’d look at it and know it was finished; not one more brushstroke could make it any better.

  Maribel took medication for her frequent spiraling emotional states and, per her doctor’s recommendation, long walks through the Latin Quarter that were meant to clear her mind. Lately, I was the only one willing to join her. That day, we started out at Café Mabillon and were chatted up by some Swedish tourists at the next table over. They mistook us for natives, and we flexed our Parisian accents and affectations, thrilled that they couldn’t tell the difference. They were on their honeymoon, and I envied the way they checked each other’s eyes after every sentence and spoke in a dialect of We. They could be mistaken for siblings and told us they were both accountants and met while working at the same firm. They paused to look at each other, and in that instant I imagined them in bed, the man’s strawberry blond hair on the pillow, her feathery tresses against his chest.

  We left them to go browse the stalls of the bouquinistes, and while Maribel checked out the book bins looking for interesting cover artwork, I eavesdropped on a brown-bearded American expat in a navy fisherman’s sweater at the next stall over as he told a pair of Mexican backpackers, in French-spattered English, how he’d come to Paris twenty-five years earlier as a philosophy student but had fallen in love with both a woman and the city and never returned home. Now he operated a stall selling Belle Époque postcards and painting reproductions, but he was really a raconteur, a storyteller, a lover of words and the language of the soul.

  I thought of my father. Once, before my graduation, I’d mentioned the possibility of changing direction and not studying
diplomacy as I’d been planning. Papi thought I meant I’d join him and Santi at the family business, but when I said I was considering something more creative, he shook his head as if I’d been terribly mistaken and said there was no need for that; I was already an artist by blood; all immigrants are artists because they create a life, a future, from nothing but a dream. The immigrant’s life is art in its purest form. That’s why God has special sympathy for immigrants, because Diosito was the first artist, and Jesus, un pobre desplazado.

  “It’s not the same, Papi,” I’d tried, but he shook his head.

  “Pero of course it is, mijita. All your life is a work of art. A painting is not a painting but the way you live each day. A song is not a song but the words you share with the people you love. A book is not a book but the choices you make every day trying to be a decent person.”

  When we were on our way again Maribel looked to the American and sighed, “A thousand idiots come to Paris every day thinking they’re artists but hardly any really have it in them. Look at me. I was born and bred for this shit and I don’t even have it in me.”

  “Come on, Maribel. Everybody knows you’re talented,” I said, and it was true, but everyone also knew that Maribel was a third-generation painter of commercially viable lineage, with a greater chance of making money from it than the majority of her peers.

  “Basta, Lita. I know what I am. I’m a great imitator. I’m learned, not original. But people can’t tell the difference.”

  She talked as we crossed through Saint Germain, and seared through cigarette after cigarette, rambling that she wanted to disappear, dissolve into the earth like spit. By the time we reached rue du Cherche-Midi, she’d worked herself into a disquieted frenzy, stopping along the wall of a building to gather forces for the rest of the walk home.

  A green BMW pulled up along the curb in front of us. Its windows rolled down, and a man in one of those checked shirts with the initials sewn into the pocket that Loic owned by the dozen leaned across the passenger seat and waved us over. I thought he was asking for directions, so I stepped forward.

  “I’m looking for something tropical,” he said.

  I assumed “Tropicale” was the name of a bar or restaurant in the area and said I hadn’t heard of it, but he laughed and pointed to Maribel on the wall behind me.

  “How much for both of you?”

  He could have been a father, a doctor, or an executive, with his suit jacket neatly folded across the passenger seat. According to that gold wedding band twinkling in the window frame, he was also a husband.

  “How much?” He rubbed his fingers together to make sure I understood he meant money.

  I walked over to the car, slow, slinky, the way I imagined the Avenue Foch girls did when getting ready to climb into a car. I bent down to the window, smiling a smile that did not belong to me but to some other girl with solid gold cojones.

  “That depends on what you want.”

  “How much for the ass?” He was practically salivating.

  I took a drag on my cigarette and turned my hips toward him.

  “This ass?”

  He nodded, showing me a wide symmetrical smile that must have cost a fortune.

  I leaned into the window.

  “This ass will cost you extra.”

  I grabbed his wrist and pressed it firmly on the window frame with one hand, using my free hand to rub my cigarette into the top of his palm while he squealed in pain, trying to pull back his hand, but I was overcome with strength and held on tightly, singeing his pink skin with my cigarette. He called me putain, salope, pétasse, conasse, and many other words I didn’t know while I let him burn. Maribel finally grabbed my arm and we ran from the top of Cherche-Midi across the intersection down to rue du Bac before the gendarmes at the Varenne post stopped us, demanding to know why two girls were running in a neighborhood not known for velocity.

  “We’re just going home,” I told them. We weren’t but a few meters from our green doors.

  “What’s that accent?” asked the second gendarme. I could tell he was the one in charge. There is always one in charge.

  “It’s not any kind of accent. It’s the way I talk.”

  “Why were you running?”

  I looked at Maribel, breathless and not much help, and neither of us felt there was any point in telling them the truth.

  “We’re just going home.” I pointed down the road. “We live in the House of Stars.”

  “Show me your papers.”

  “We just stepped out for some air,” I started, ready to negotiate, but he shook his head and held his finger in the air as if determining the wind.

  “Your papers. Now.”

  I’d been warned that I should carry my documentation, though everyone in the neighborhood knew about Séraphine’s place and that it was full of girls from all over. But we both had only bank and métro cards on us, which didn’t prove our legitimacy enough, so they fined us five hundred francs each, in cash, which they told us we could withdraw from the bank machine around the corner.

  “How convenient for you,” I told the officer who followed to make sure we didn’t make a run for it.

  “You should thank me for not arresting you. Foreigners should have their papers on them at all times.”

  After we handed over the bills, the bossier gendarme said, “If it’s true you live in the House of Stars, I want to see you walk into it.”

  They followed as we made our way to our address, muttering about our culs, and observed as I typed the security pass code into the keypad and pushed open the door to the entrance court. They watched from the sidewalk as we crossed the courtyard and I produced a key and opened our way into the house. As we stepped into the foyer, we turned to face the guards and flipped them off: I, with the American middle finger, and Maribel, Spanish-style, with two fingers and the back of the hand. The gendarmes responded by sticking out their tongues and grabbing their crotches, thrusting in our direction, all of which, I’m sure you know, translates directly.

  8

  There was this: the sight of him waiting for me by a stone column on the Deauville station platform. The train brakes locked, passengers gathered their bags and filed out, but I waited, wanting to be the last off the train. And there it was, the change, my walking to him, his folding me into his chest, the entwining of the arms, inevitable, and when I pulled away from him, his face was new again. Those dusty eyes turned a radiant green, his cheeks, flushed and dewy. He took my bag in one hand and offered me the other, and we walked together as if this were our routine: my return to a village on the Côte Fleurie. A village I’d never been to, had never known existed until he called that morning to invite me to see him there. And now this place was another room in the home of my life.

  “I was afraid you wouldn’t come,” he said.

  When he called that morning to invite me, I’d heard his voice quake with uncertainty, and felt the caution in mine.

  “You want me to come today?” I’d wanted him to feel unreasonable, still stung by his sudden departure.

  He said I could take the afternoon train. Séraphine was beside me as I spoke. I was the only girl in the house without a personal mobile phone, and the only way he knew to reach me was by calling the house line—a number he’d located through his father’s secretary—and had called three times before catching me at home. I took the call in her bedroom, and she watched me until I finally said yes, I’d go to him.

  We drove from Deauville to Blonville-sur-Mer. Avenues turned to dirt roads ripping through fields of tall grass. In the twilight it looked to me like the land of Playmobil, brick houses with dark wooden beams, rock walls, sheep, cows like toasted marshmallows scattered along rolling green meadows. Dusk folded over the countryside, and in a moment I couldn’t pinpoint, I’d found my way out of my world into his.

  The house was on the edge of the village, at the end of a forgotten lane lined with empty lots left to birds and other drifting animals, just south of a lumpy beach f
acing England. I heard waves through an open window, across the garden and over the wall lining the property.

  “I hope you feel at home here,” he said, but the house was quiet and still like my mother’s convent, with rooms that felt as if they hadn’t been walked through in years.

  He showed me to the guest room on the ground floor with white plaster walls adorned with sun-faded flower prints. There was no furniture other than a large iron bed set with embroidered country blankets and a wooden dresser near the door, its drawers empty.

  While he went to the garden to fill a canvas sack with firewood from a pile in the corner of the yard, I walked through the front rooms of the house, cold at nightfall, sheets covering the rocking chair, the pale blue sofa, and the plaid armchair. A dead room without photographs.

  His seemed to me a house that had lost and perhaps hoped to recover.

  I searched for evidence of who he was before our meeting. I hoped to find clues of his parentage, the father I’d heard about. The lost mother. I looked for her because I was sure a mother is never really lost. A blue ceramic cross was nailed to a wall in the kitchen on an otherwise bare stucco surface between a cabinet and a window. I imagined his mother placing it there. For protection. For decoration. It was his house now but he kept the cross where she left it.

  The kitchen, however, breathed with life, a wooden table at its center holding a bowl of fruit, a tray of vegetables. I pictured him standing over the stove, running water from the faucet. I saw him pull knives from the block, chopping parsley on the wooden board.

  Next to the kitchen, a den with a fireplace, toile-papered walls lined with shelves full of books that would be easy tinder if the flames ever grew large enough. On a table along the wall, an old record player. Set on the wooden floorboards, just beyond the frayed gray carpet, a small stereo system. I hadn’t seen a television or a telephone anywhere in the house and wondered from where he phoned to invite me. This room did not smell abandoned. The books gathered no dust and the record player held the Rolling Stones’ December’s Children.