It's Not Love, It's Just Paris

by Engel, Patricia

  “What is this scar from?”

  “I was sick as a child,” he said, his eyes suddenly heavy with what looked like fatigue or regret. “My throat closed and I became very skinny, so they inserted a tube there.”

  “A tube?”

  “To feed me.”

  He put his finger over mine, slipping it over the scar.

  “What did you have?”

  “Bad lungs.”

  “Like asthma?”

  “In a way.”

  I kissed his mouth. I told him we were all sick as children, ill with childhood, invalids in a world of indelicate adults with the wrong prognoses and cures.

  We made love again. Afterward he said, as if it were a long time ago, “I remember when I saw you by the torch that night. You were wearing that blouse with the dragon on the back.”

  “It was borrowed.”

  “I knew it. By the way you wore it I knew it wasn’t yours. I wondered, Why is she wearing a shirt that doesn’t belong to her? That’s why I talked to you. I never speak to strange people. Especially to a girl standing alone on a street corner in the middle of the night. In this city, that’s only looking for trouble. But I saw the dragon before I saw your face, and when I walked beside you on the bridge and saw your eyes, so suspicious of me, I knew I liked you.”

  “I’m still suspicious of you.”

  “I still like you. Very much.”

  There was something in his sweet first impressions. Those willful projections. I wondered if we were whom the other hoped. He hadn’t yet said when he would leave. So I pretended he was here forever. There was no morning, only this perpetual hour, this room warm with our breath and sweat, these sheets pushed off the bed, this silence of two bare bodies.

  9

  I began having lofty visions that made me a little afraid of myself. Visions of things I never knew I wanted. To be married. To make a life. To have a home together; a twofold narcissism leaving me self-conscious of how I held his hand when we walked along the chilly streets, not wanting to be one of those girls clinging to her lover like a monkey on a palm or, like Maribel, who crumpled like papier-mâché into Florian’s side, but a couple who held each other with equal possession.

  We eventually began a more practical routine, emerging from our seclusion to join the others for meals in the house kitchen when Giada would cook a pot of pasta for all the residents, or at Far Niente. I observed as Cato became friendlier with Rachid and Stef, who were also unlike the majority of swaggering boys who passed through the house, wallets full of cash and credit cards, lives fueled by a pipeline of connections. I was pleased the others, even Tarentina, had accepted him into their ranks, and though he wasn’t one for crowds, I noticed his gentle way with people, slowly disarming, truthful, ingenuous. They teased him for never wanting to join the group out at the nightclubs or for not staying beyond one beer at Claude’s before complaining about the smoke, calling him a country boy. But Cato didn’t seem to mind, and I enjoyed that rather than experiencing Paris nightlife, he preferred to be home with me.

  Even Romain warmed to Cato, and on slow nights at Far Niente when he had nothing to do but pull up a chair and join us at our preferred long corner table, I watched them talk about growing up by the sea, and the beast of city life.

  I had term paper orders to fulfill for the girls and their friends, and during those hours, Cato would read on my bed while I worked at the desk or go out with Sharif and, occasionally, to visit his father. Romain started turning up again for his reading sessions, pronouncing with more fluidity and confidence, and though he’d been a bit removed those first days, we both settled back into our reading routine.

  When we arrived at the part when Martin and Ruth fall in love, Romain dropped the book into his lap.

  “Help me to understand something, Lita. Something I’ve been wondering about for a while now.”

  “What is it?”

  “What exactly are you doing with Antoine de Manou’s kid?”

  I wasn’t surprised the news had reached him but was taken aback by the contempt in his voice.

  “What is that supposed to mean?”

  “I’m just …” he screwed his lips into a sneery pout. “… surprised.”

  “Surprised at what? You seem to be getting along with him just fine.”

  “I just thought …”

  “You just thought what?”

  “I thought you would’ve had more integrity than to fall for the son of a savage.”

  “He’s nothing like his father.”

  “Every man is like his father.”

  “Well, your father is a butcher. So what does that make you?”

  “It’s not the same. People have to eat.”

  “And your father is happy to deal in cadavers.”

  He let out a low whistle. “Incredible. Only two months in France and you’ve already been converted to de Manou’s party. Your parents will be so proud.”

  “He’s not for you to judge. You barely know him.”

  “As do you.”

  “I think I know him better than you do.”

  “I’m sorry to tell you this, but it takes more than a few weeks in bed together to know a man.”

  If he hadn’t been one of my first friends in Paris I would have kicked him out, but I only stood up to search my desk drawer for an old pack of cigarettes, untouched since Cato’s arrival because he didn’t smoke or like the smell of it.

  “Believe me, Romain, there are many other ways I’d rather spend my afternoons than reading a novel I’ve already read in slow motion with you. And all you want is to insult me?”

  “It’s not insults. It’s honesty. Why are Americans so sensitive?”

  I opened the balcony doors and leaned on the railing, putting as much space as I could between Romain and me, though he took it as a cue to follow me and now stood beside me, pulling a cigarette from his own pack and lighting it close to my face.

  “You girls are all the same.” His exhale of smoke hit my cheek. “You say you came to Paris to become educated and cultured. You say you want to be women of the world but all you really want is a boyfriend.”

  “Don’t tell me you’ve never been in love.”

  “Too many times, actually. But I don’t plan on letting it happen again. Love is a distraction. It steals time, talent, focus, and turns great minds to mush. It’s a perfect waste.”

  “You sound like you’ve had your heart broken.”

  “Me? Never. I’m the one who does the breaking. But it does hurt to be the one leaving sometimes. I won’t deny that.”

  “Well, then, you have it all figured out.”

  He rubbed his stub into the ashtray on the railing between us and offered me an expression I could see he’d learned from acting, a face that asked to be forgiven for being naughty.

  “So,” he said, when we’d settled back onto the floor. “Where is the Little Prince this afternoon anyway?”

  “Don’t call him that. He’s having lunch with his father.”

  “And does Papa know his son has taken up residence with you?”

  I tapped the book cover in his hands. “Just read, will you?”

  “He’s not ashamed of you, is he?” He was grinning, so I tried to take it as a joke, kicking him across the carpet until he caught my foot with his hand and finally started reading again.

  But the question lingered.

  A few nights later, over jasmine tea and brochettes at Tokyorama, when Cato mentioned that he’d stopped by his father’s place that afternoon, I took the opportunity to ask, casually, as if it hadn’t been on my mind for days, “Does he know you’re staying with me?”

  “He assumes I’m staying with Sharif. But he doesn’t like him, so he never asks.”

  “Are you hiding me?” I hated myself for asking.

  “No.” He took a long breath, watching me with eyes that asked for patience.

  “One day you will meet him, Lita. And you will understand everything.”

&nb
sp; Cato went back to Blonville-sur-Mer for a few days in early November to get some warmer clothes. Even so, we’d mostly stopped venturing into the white-breath night because it made his back ache and worsened his subtle, never-departing cough. Sometimes those coughs turned into heaving gasps that left him hunched over, supporting himself on the hood of a parked car. I thought he should see a doctor but didn’t have one to recommend, only knew of the doctors who came to see Séraphine or the ones the other girls visited for their birth control pills. It didn’t occur to me that his father must have had access to the best doctors in the country.

  On an unseasonably mild day in December I had the idea to go to the Palais Royal. Earlier in the afternoon, we’d gone to see the new Tony Gatlif movie about a French guy who ends up living among a Roma community and ultimately falls for the pretty gypsy girl, which I thought was a predictable story line, and Cato didn’t disagree with me, but that’s because I was being difficult and he was being careful. For weeks, the house had rustled with holiday chatter, the girls’ plans for their glamorous getaways while I’d be the only one going home for the break. Cato said he usually spent Christmas with his father and the new year with Sharif’s family in Goutte d’Or, so that morning, as we dressed, I extended what I thought was a casual invitation.

  “You know, you could come to the States and spend the holidays with me and I could introduce—”

  “I can’t go.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s not easy for me to travel like it is for you,” he said and, reading my thoughts, added, “and it’s got nothing to do with money.”

  “But—”

  “I can’t, Lita. I just can’t.”

  There was a coolness between us for the rest of the day, on the walk to the theater and the bus ride to the Palais Royal. Just the night before, in the midst of the House of Stars’ winter party, it occurred to me that I’d never been happier in all my life than I was with Cato, even with his reticence about the holidays. Fewer people were invited to this party because, with the bone chill, we were confined indoors, but the house was ripe with laughter, lovers tucked into corners, girls and boys meeting each other for the first time, and Cato beside me. The night concluded like so many others, with us cloistered in Tarentina’s room, passing around the shisha pipe. Rachid dismantled a cigarette, removing the filter and some tobacco, packing the gaps with a smidge of hashish tar, chased by another spliff folded with the Turkish weed Giada brought back from her last weekend in Berlin. The joints went around the group three or four times. I never took a turn, hearing my father’s doctrine that to dabble is to dip one’s hands in the blood of many nations. But by the fifth round that night, I relented and went in for a hit. Then, for the first time since I’d known him, Cato reached for one, too. But when Sharif looked up from his conversation with Rachid, he lurched across the circle of crossed legs to snatch it from Cato’s lips. Everyone laughed, but I saw from Sharif’s twisted brows that it wasn’t meant to be comical. He muttered something too quick for me to understand, followed by something in Arabic that only Rachid and maybe Dominique would have caught if they’d been paying attention, which they were not.

  The next day in the Palais Royal, as we made our way through the corridor of the Galerie de Valois, Cato collapsed beside me.

  I caught him before he hit the ground, holding him and screaming for help in all my languages while Cato choked on his own breath, his face reddening and whitening. He managed to pull his wallet from his jeans pocket, opening the front flap to show me a medical card, which I gave to the medics when they arrived, and just before they covered his face with an oxygen bubble, pulling him off me onto an orange plastic stretcher, he gasped my name.

  I waited for more, but he looked at me as if I were a mere stranger who’d picked him up, pushing out the words, “Call my father.”

  Later, when I got ahold of him, Sharif would tell me it happened the same way during his last attack four years ago. Cato knew better, he said. It was the smoke from the night before, which we’d all held into our chests and released with ease and laughter, full of latent fungi that ignited spores on Cato’s cystic lungs. He was sick long before I met him. Sharif said we could blame the winds of Chernobyl. Sharif and Cato were eleven at the time of the toxic disaster, vacationing with their mothers in Bretagne when the radioactive cloud and subsequent rains passed over them. Until a few years earlier, Cato’s father headed the committee denying the rumored health effects of the blast on children in France.

  Cato was one of many, Sharif said. It had started with a cancer. A nodule on his thyroid that was removed. Hadn’t I noticed the faded white seam of stitches at the base of his neck?

  “I’ve only got an irregular thyroid I control with daily medication,” Sharif said. “Cato got it much, much worse.”

  After the cancer, pulmonary sarcoidosis. Some live with it, unaffected, but it made Cato inhumanly susceptible to dust and bacteria. Where the average person’s lungs heal with a diminutive scar, his grew fibrous tissue. Sharif said Cato had arthritis and was in pain all the time. Hadn’t I noticed the steroids he took every day, the orange inhaler he carried in his pocket? Sharif insisted Paris was too much for Cato—he needed the purest oxygen nature could offer.

  “Why else,” he said, “do you think he would choose to live all alone in that house on the edge of the world?”

  I closed my eyes as if that would change anything and saw only Cato. His temperate negotiations to avoid going in the métro—claustrophobia, he said—or join the others when they invited us to smoke-filled nightclubs and parties. The mornings when he woke up almost blue, coughing, blaming it on the dust in the old House of Stars, I thought only of the lazy maids, not of how I’d once teased, “You look like a corpse when you sleep,” and he hadn’t laughed.

  Loic drove me to the American Hospital in Neuilly every day to see if I could get past the nurses who’d been instructed to turn away visitors. On the eighth day he was released to his father’s care. Sharif convinced Monsieur de Manou to let me visit, explaining that I was respectable, one of the House of Stars girls, and on the eleventh day, after the office of Monsieur de Manou called Séraphine to verify this fact, I was given an appointment.

  Antoine de Manou’s apartment occupied the entire third floor of an elegant building on rue Vaneau. A young butler in a white jacket showed me to the sitting room. The walls were lined with plaques and dignitary portraits of the suited elder de Manou standing with other decorated men in posed handshakes, and older photos of him in military clothing, wearing medals, gazing meditatively over some foreign landscape. I heard muffled voices in another room followed by footsteps in the corridor, and then a thin woman in a tailored dress suit with a narrow avian face arrived in the doorway, waving me toward her. She didn’t introduce herself and only looked straight ahead as she led me down the hall, warning, “You’ll have thirty minutes with Felix. You must not touch him or allow your voice to rise above the level of a whisper. You may be alarmed when you see him. He’s sedated for his comfort.”

  We turned into another hall where a nurse sat on a chair outside a door, knitting a shapeless gray mass. She nodded at both of us, and the thin woman pushed open the door and left me to walk in on my own.

  He was lying in a frameless bed, flat, covered by a white blanket, surrounded by buzzing monitors, cables running along his arms and under his sheet, electric buds taped to his bruised chest. His nose and mouth were covered by a breathing mask, his eyes closed in what resembled a peaceful sleep despite the needles lodged in his veins.

  Two more nurses watched over him and the machines from his bedside. One of them stood up so I could sit. She was an older lady, from Slovakia, she told me, when I later asked.

  “Felix,” she said in a naturally coarse voice that tried hard to be soft, “your friend is here to see you.”

  She touched my arm. “He can hear you.”

  I didn’t speak. I didn’t touch him. I didn’t reach under the sheet so he c
ould feel my hand. I only observed the outline of his body under the cotton shroud, those motionless arms and legs that I’d believed were created to be wrapped around me. How badly I wanted to share with him that, in the days since he collapsed, I’d worn his clothes, slept in the dirty shirts he’d left piled on the chair in the corner of our room. I wore his gray sweater with the frayed hem and hole under the arm that day. I wondered if he knew it, if he could smell himself on me.

  In those days of anxious waiting, Tarentina had taken me aside and told me, “This is life telling you it’s time to walk away.”

  I searched Cato’s eyelids for the movement of dreams but they were still.

  The old man stopped me as I stepped out of his foyer into the building hall to head home. He was shorter and more blockish than I expected and I could see clear over his square bald head, through the few hard white hairs combed over his spotted scalp. He wore a brown suit, periwinkle shirt, and orange tie.

  “Lucrecia,” he began.

  “Leticia,” I said, but he didn’t acknowledge my clarification, and instead stared back as if I’d insulted him.

  “Do you know who I am?”

  “You’re Cato’s father.”

  “Yes, and it is because Felix is my son that I must share with you that your interest in his well-being is touching but unnecessary. You may be assured that as my son he receives superior medical care. Your presence, while you might think it comforting, is a nuisance, a distraction, and thus we might consider it … debilitating. Am I making myself clear?”

  He swayed when he spoke, trembling from the neck, without taking a breath, so that his words sounded thin, never rising or falling in tone, as if reading from a prompter, not looking at me but through me.

  “I’m not sure I understand, sir.”

  “Well then, let me try it this way. Until Felix’s cousin brought your name to my attention, I had never heard of you. You can determine for yourself what this says about your friendship with my son.”