It's Not Love, It's Just Paris

by Engel, Patricia

  I heard the door, his shuffling under the weight of the wood he carried. He called my name.

  “I’m here. With your books.”

  He appeared, his eyes bright. He moved past me and pulled the screen from the fireplace, arranging the wood on the iron nest, pulling a few sheets from the stack of newspaper beside the mantel. He struck a large match on the box at his knees and let the flame burn long and high before lowering the match to a corner of the paper. He coughed. Gently, at first, and then violently, stepping to the window, parting the curtains, lifting the pane, and lowering his head as if starving for fresh air. He seemed delicate to me. I wondered if it was the nature of solitary children. He breathed deeply until his coughing calmed, turning to me on the floor where I sat with my knees pressed to my chest.

  “You look so small sitting there.”

  I told him to come sit beside me, and he pulled some pillows from a stack in the corner, arranging them so we could lean back, eyes on the fire.

  “Now you see where I live,” he said.

  “It’s so quiet here.” But it was more than silence. A remoteness.

  “What’s your home like?”

  “Crowded,” I smiled. How to explain that I grew up in a house more like its own barrio? “It’s full of people and animals.”

  But to tell him how it was now, I had to tell him about my parents, orphans who’d designed their own tribe, and in speaking of them I felt so far from them.

  “After my mother died, I would tell people I was an orphan. It was wrong for me to say but that’s how it felt even though I still had a father.”

  He told me he was twelve when she died. His cousin, Sharif, and his mother spent summers at the house with Cato and his mother. The mothers were sisters only a year apart. They left the boys playing at the beach and went to the market to buy food for dinner, their car hit by another, speeding from the direction of the Deauville casinos.

  “The police said they were both killed instantly, but it was almost thirty minutes before the medics made it down the ravine.”

  He shook his head. “I used to tell Sharif I don’t think anyone dies in an instant. It must take time for life to leave the body. But Sharif prefers to think they both went out like candles.”

  After her death, he remained at the house in the care of the Guadeloupian governess named Mireille who helped raise him. She’d recently retired after three decades in France, returning home to Le Gosier to be with her children and their children.

  “She wanted me to go with her. She said the Caribbean air would be a good change for me.”

  “Why didn’t you go?”

  “I’ve never wanted to live anywhere but here. I want to die here.”

  “What about your father? Does he come visit you often?”

  “Maybe twice a year. Usually in the summer when the weather is mild.”

  He looked to the window, then back at me, with a tinge of misgiving. “Do you know about my father?”

  “Séraphine told me a little bit.”

  He sighed as if he’d been expecting this moment.

  “My father is a complicated man. His passions are always against something. He’s the sort of man who must prove his brilliance in every breath.”

  I thought he sounded a bit like Santi, who made everything a debate.

  “How did your parents meet?”

  “He was married once before. His first wife died of a brain hemorrhage. They never had children. Many years later my mother was hired as his secretary. He was almost twenty years older than her, and they married after a year together, but he always kept us very separate from his public life. We lived here and he came to see us some weekends and we behaved as a family, but my parents were so different. She was very careful with money, and he spent it like a man who’d never had to work. When he came to visit he took us to expensive restaurants in Deauville, and I remember my mother always looked like a guest at his table.”

  He looked into the fire and spoke to the flames slowly.

  “Sometimes I think I’m the only one who remembers her. It’s easier for my father perhaps, because she wasn’t the first wife he lost. He tells me I’m too sentimental. He says life goes on, but in many ways it doesn’t.”

  He stood up and left me to climb the wooden stairs, the creaks sharp and loud. He returned, lowered his body onto the cushions, and handed me a large silver frame, lustrous from daily polishing, holding a photograph. Her blonde hair pulled into a loose braid, wearing a straw sunhat, the top frills of a floral dress, her bare freckled shoulders exposed. She had her son’s plump lips, the same disorganized smile; she looked happy, but something in her half laugh betrayed that such moments of joy and abandon were rare.

  “You must miss her.”

  “It’s strange, when I was a child I loved her so much, as if I already understood that I wouldn’t have her for long, and now that she’s gone I love her as if she were still alive, just taking too long to come home.”

  We watched each other.

  “It’s late,” he said. “We should go to sleep.”

  “What about the fire?” I pointed to it, still smoldering.

  “We’ll let it burn out.”

  He led me to the guest room and remained in the doorway while I stood at the center of the room. He said good-bye so softly I might have imagined it, closing the door behind him, and I was alone in the room of dusty flowers. His footsteps echoed up the stairs and then on the floor above me, until it was quiet and I felt him doing just as I was, standing at the foot of the bed, sensing me as I sensed him.

  That morning I woke up long before I heard him stir upstairs, waiting in bed as the watery morning light filled the room, the pressed sheets against my bare body, hoping he’d come knocking on the door to wake me, but he didn’t. He went from the base of the stairs to the kitchen, filled the kettle with water, moving about the tile floor, teacups clinking. I showered and dressed, wandering with hair dripping down my back to the kitchen. He was at the table, leaning over a newspaper. He wore wire-rim reading glasses, a small new discovery about him that thrilled me.

  I asked what was happening in the world but quickly added, “Never mind. Don’t tell me. I don’t want to know.”

  During those days, we began a habit of lying together without touching. On the desolate strip of beach just steps from his house. The sun at its noon peak buried into a pastel sky, cold sand under our feet. We wore sweaters, hats, and scarves, stretched on a blanket as waves hit the beaches once stormed by the Allies. He told me he came there every morning and sometimes at sunset through the warmer months. He worked at the marina maintaining boats, washing them, polishing, doing whatever needed to be done. He liked outdoor work. But it wasn’t consistent work, because sometimes the boats left for Le Havre or La Rochelle, Cap Ferret or Mallorca, and though it would have been good money, he didn’t have the captain’s license to transport the boats himself. He’d taken his baccalaureate in history and studied the same in university, but such a degree was only good for indoor jobs. He’d passed the tourism exam, too, but confessed he wasn’t very good with people, so he’d never been hired when applying to give D-day tours. He’d had a few friends growing up, but they’d all moved to Paris or other cities by now, for school and for work. And Sharif didn’t visit anymore—they only saw each other when Cato went to Paris.

  “You have your own corner of the sea here,” I said, though it seemed a coast of ghosts with its leftover war tanks and murky foam-capped waves rushing the shore.

  “Do you ever get lonely out here?”

  “I’m used to solitude,” he said. “But yes, now that you’re here, I realize I’ve been very alone.”

  And then I understood that between us there was a common spore of isolation that grew in my overpopulated home and within his quiet cottage. We were young but we’d both grown well into our loneliness. We were the kind of lonely that wasn’t ashamed to be so. A lonely without self-penitence.

  We didn’t speak of tomorro
w when I’d leave on an afternoon train. We didn’t make plans. We ate dinner together in the kitchen and when we were finished I peeled an orange from the bowl and gave him half.

  Afterward, we lay on the pillows before the cracking fire that warmed the room so much that we pulled off our sweaters and socks, down to our loose jeans and T-shirts. The conversation turned to whispers. His fingertips—nails short, but unbitten—moved to my hand, playing with my fingers, kneading my knuckles like rosary beads, then glided over the terrain of my face. He would come to see me in Paris soon, he said. He kissed me, and then again for a long time. I remember the sight of us as if I were floating above, two sleeping figures by the fire, faces sharing a cushion, toes touching, torsos bowed into each other.

  A lifetime without hearing the name de Manou and now I saw and heard it everywhere. When I opened my balcony doors for the last cigarette of the evening, I’d hear Saira’s television above echoing with the nightly news. The report of the day’s strikes, the week’s national complaints, the name Antoine de Manou followed by a sound byte of a raspy, gurgled voice heaving that France no longer belonged to the French. “We,” meaning the French, needed to reclaim it, close its doors to foreigners responsible for crime, unemployment, drugs, and riots. De Manou couldn’t get through a sentence without pausing to clear his throat, swallowing saliva so much that he was regularly satirized in the form of a drooling dog-faced puppet on Les Guignols.

  His far-right party had come in third for popularity in last spring’s elections; the opposition commentators argued that de Manou represented Old France and New France should be progressive, seek solutions beyond the fueling of old resentments. Then the news would cut back to the studio reporter who’d wrap up with the question: Would Antoine de Manou run for president again? He’d run twice already and not won. Was he too old? With France in crisis, on the cusp of transitioning from the franc to the euro, would de Manou’s party gain strength or become obsolete like in the MC Solaar song?

  The newspaper stand at the fused arteries of rue du Bac, boulevard Saint Germain, and boulevard Raspail displayed front pages featuring de Manou’s tirades on banning headscarves and traditional robes in the classroom, cultural clues that distracted from his vision of the Ideal Authentic France. He had ideas like turning certain banlieues into closed colonies, increasing deportations, and banning nationalization for children of immigrants. The year before, he’d even remarked that Les Bleues, the French national soccer team, a majority of them minorities, didn’t reflect the true France. Under the headlines, a photograph of a well-dressed gentleman or a madman, pig-nosed and large-eyed with spotted cheeks and tubular lips that flapped outward showing his old gums and false teeth. A man under the weight of decades of accusations of committing torture in Algeria for which he’d never been tried because, as Séraphine said, the French have a long memory for some things and a short memory for others.

  He was all wrinkles and creases, with bags under his eyes and a shiny head, bald but for a few stubborn threads and fuzzy patches above his ears, only useful for holding his thick black glasses in place.

  I searched those newspaper and magazine portraits for traces of his son but couldn’t find any.

  On days that I stopped in a café with Loic or some of the other girls, I’d catch his name in conversation at a nearby table or find a paper that had been left behind on the banquette; a cover photo of the contorted face of Le Vieux de Manou with one of his preferred slogans—Aliens Out! or True France! Pure France!—printed above his head. It didn’t matter the neighborhood or the venue, de Manou’s unyielding fight against a tainted nation was on the public’s lips, and I wished I could return to my former ignorance, when the only de Manou I knew was the one who asked me if I was lost.

  I met him at Gare Saint-Lazare just after sunset. It was dark and cold, even through my warmest jacket, a knit hat, and scarf, with only a patch of face open to the air. I was disappointed by the size of his bag, big enough for only two or three days of travel. We kissed in the taxi all the way to the Seventh, had dinner at Le Perron, and walked to the House of Stars, which was quiet, all the others out for a Friday night, only the sound of Saira’s television buzzing on the floor above us.

  I let him into my bedroom ahead of me while I closed the door and leaned against the frame. He dropped his bag by my desk and looked at the photographs taped to the wall, stepping in to get a closer look at my family, standing next to Eden’s burial rosebush behind my mother’s old convent.

  “I like your room.” Strange to hear him say it as I felt he’d been there before.

  “There’s not much space,” I said. My bed looked very small pushed into the corner, and I suddenly felt improper.

  I’d wondered how this would go. Would we fall onto the bed in mad passion or would there be hesitation? In his house there was the buffer of an extra bedroom, but here it was my small room and the even smaller bed.

  Then, the quiet embarrassment of changing out of my clothes and into a T-shirt and shorts. He sensed my clumsy modesty and turned away without my asking. I wanted to be like Tarentina with a wardrobe of glamorous nightclothes, walking around in her lingerie, baring her body without inhibition. But I hid myself, sliding into the bed and pulling the blanket over me while he removed his shirt and I took in his lithe body, almost hairless thin skin, muscles long and liquid, his chest slightly concave. He kept on his jeans, reaching over to turn off the nightstand light, lifting the blanket only enough to slip in beside me.

  We lay like planks. My body adjusted to his warm arms against mine in the purest blindness of night. The room came into soft focus. Dots of stars over the rooftops beyond the windows, blue moonlight hitting the corners of the room. I turned my head enough to see his profile, the bridge of his nose, the rise and dips of his mouth and chin sloping down to the plateau of his chest. I held my breath, trying to be inconspicuous in my desire, but by the next breath he was above me, and then the removal of my shirt, the jeans, the underclothes.

  We stayed in bed for days, only leaving to refill a water bottle at the bedside, steal leftover food from the kitchen, or use the bathroom. The maids knocked. The other girls spoke to me through the door. I told them to go away. Violeta shouted through the hinges that she needed to clean, but I liked the smell of us filling the room, opening the balcony doors each morning for a flush of air. Loic banged on the door demanding to know if I was alive. I finally opened it a crack and saw Tarentina and Maribel watching from behind him.

  “Yes, I’m alive.” I felt Cato’s hand on mine, pulling me back to him. Never more alive.

  “Séraphine is concerned that she hasn’t seen you in days. She wants you to come down to see her when you have a chance.”

  “Yes, when I have a chance.” But I’d already relocated. I lived in that room with him now. The bed was our house. The rug, our garden.

  We told each other stories, filling the emptiness of the years spent waiting. I told him of my family, my race through school, running on guilt for the debt of my parents’ hardships, my life a project in honoring their sacrifices, how I never felt that my life belonged only to me but to them and I sometimes resented it, which made me ashamed. I told him about my brothers, one with a warrior gene, born for an army my mother would never let him join, and the other, a wounded soul, deemed so helpless that one of our dogs, a German shepherd named Ramses, had been specially trained to watch over him so he wouldn’t hurt himself.

  He told me that as a boy he’d had a German shepherd, too. His mother had named her Anastasia and she’d slept at his side, licking his fingers to wake him for school. But his father hated animals, and when he visited, Anastasia was forced to stay outside. Cato sneaked her in from the yard to sleep in his room. When his father came in the morning and saw the dog on the bed, he took it by the collar, dragged it down the stairs, put it in his car, and drove away. When Cato asked what happened to Anastasia, he was always told different things—that his father gave the dog away to another family, that h
e left her by the road, that he took the dog to a field and shot her. The last possibility, he said, the most likely.

  I tried to conceal my shock as he pressed further into my embrace.

  I told him I’d never had friends in school. They thought me too strange. The only friend I did have was Ajax, who seemed to quietly hate me so much that once, because I wouldn’t give him money for drugs, he tried to stab me with a pocketknife my father gave him when he took us all fishing in the Poconos. And then there was Daniel. But ours was juvenile affection, born out of proximity more than desire.

  Cato considered Sharif lucky; his father’s Moroccan family in Paris took him in even though his father went back to Morocco fifteen years ago and hadn’t been allowed to reenter France. Sharif had plenty of aunts, uncles, and other cousins in France, so he didn’t need Cato as much as Cato needed him. Sharif had also discovered a passion for graffiti soon after their mothers died, a reason to stay on the streets rather than go home and remember that his mother was no longer there waiting for him.

  “But I’m the opposite. After my mother died it was hard for me to leave my house. It still is.”

  “Was it hard for you to leave to come here?”

  “Yes. But I’m happy I came. I’ve been following you around in my mind since the night I met you.”

  We were still new to each other, transcribing the weight of each other’s flesh to our bones. The eyes and the wounds and the longing living beneath them would always be new until we were old and by then being old would be new. I ran my palm from his chest over the ridges of his ribs to his navel. My finger dipped into a crescent scar in its orbit. I loved scars; I was covered in them from countless falls as a distracted child, chasing Santi through the woods as we played Indios and Españoles.