It's Not Love, It's Just Paris

by Engel, Patricia

  I was silent as he took a step into the hall toward me, his nostrils expanding.

  “Now that you have seen he is safe and well cared for, I am sure you will understand when I tell you that there is no need for you to return.”

  With that, he stepped back into his home and shut the door.

  10

  My mother and I sat together on the window seat in my childhood bedroom. I looked through the glass to the backyard, grass turned gray, dying of winter, and the Christmas lights brightening trees and bushes under the pale northeastern sunset. It seemed my parents had aged more rapidly in the four months I was away, but now that she had me alone, my mother said it was I who’d aged, looking both thin and bloated, ashy with inverted halos darkening my eyes.

  I’d wanted to stay with him in Paris. On the plane ride home, I told myself I’d get used to this feeling of my soul divided. My body would show up for Navidad with la familia, and my unseen self would remain with him, on a horizon I saw scrawled with our names the way he’d written them into the shoulder of the bronze statue on the Pont Alexandre, the way I’d scribbled them into the inner covers of my diary, drawn them onto my dry skin with my jagged fingernails, traced them into the cool flesh of his back as he hovered over me in the bruise-blue darkness of my Paris bedroom.

  I was picked up at the airport by all my family, but was numb as my father’s car negotiated one highway packed with holiday traffic onto another, the strip malls lined with flashing red and green lights, glittering garlands, fat Santas, and cartoonish reindeer in storefront windows.

  I had to tell my mother about him in a way that wouldn’t scare her. She was already uncertain of her motherhood, often doubting herself, relying more on prayers than her own wisdom to guide me. She’d once confessed to me that she didn’t know how to be a parent. She felt like an overgrown orphan who’d never learned the methods of motherhood. A lioness acting on instinct over reason.

  I described a boy and a girl who met among friends by the river on a warm late summer night.

  “His father is a distinguished man,” I said, the polite way, Séraphine told me, of referring to men of a certain status, but my mother didn’t understand and waited for more.

  “He’s an important man.”

  I told her Cato’s mother had died and about his childhood in the countryside, and that his father lived near the House of Stars.

  We watched each other.

  My mother was already a mother at my age. Now she was tired yet striking in her rugged wild way. Her eyes had fallen a bit since I last saw her. Her firm lips had thinned. I moved to stand up and leave her alone on the window seat, but she touched my hand lightly and I was still. I wanted to tell her it finally happened: The elusive love-knowledge she’d described to me when I was a child was now mine. But her eyes said beware—the same look she gave me long ago when I’d fallen in love with Daniel and she told me quietly, as we chopped vegetables together for the dinner soup, “Nobody tells you that when you give yourself completely to someone, you never get all of yourself back.”

  I had thrown her advice back in her face.

  “That’s because you’ve only loved one man in your life.”

  A man who’d loved her out of her girlhood and away from her country.

  But my mother wasn’t cruel or punishing the way other mothers can be, and responded only by picking up her cutting board to slide the tomatoes into the pot on the stove before coming back to her place at the counter beside me.

  “I’m only saying that in life there are illusions and sometimes you don’t discover what they are until many years later.”

  We arrived an hour early to claim our seats for the midnight Mass. My mother spent the waiting time on her knees, eyes shut, her knuckles laced with her favorite rosary, which my father made for her out of nails as a wedding gift. He leaned back into the pew, glancing around at the other parishioners, up at the vaulted ceiling. Santi and his girlfriend of one year, Priscilla, daughter of Salvador, the famous painter of skeletal condors from Bucaramanga, held hands, stealing an occasional kiss on the lips with an eye on my mother to make sure she was still praying.

  Priscilla wanted to marry my brother, but Santi wasn’t yet sure. She was twenty-three and told him she was a virgin upon meeting him, thinking it would make him more interested. She spoke openly of her maternal cravings, her lack of ambition for anything but keeping a house. She cooked desserts for our family and made her breasts and thighs the highlight of every outfit. Next to her I was plain and boyish. She didn’t understand why I worked so hard in school. She said men don’t like so much education and that literature, art, and history were for depressives.

  “Men are fragile, Lita. A woman’s role is to baby them, not be smarter than them.”

  When I told her I was going away to France, she said a woman shouldn’t travel alone except to visit her relatives.

  “You are not from this century,” I told her, but she only laughed and said that being modern means knowing the old ways work best.

  “I’m going to marry your brother,” she added, fully confident in her words. “I’m going to marry him because I deserve it.”

  I sat between her and Beto, who was dressed in a suit he’d inherited from Santi, tailored down to his thin frame, the jacket still sliding off his shoulders, making him look even more of a child. He’d instantly forgiven me for leaving him with a welcome-back hug at the airport. He was already half into a nap, but our mother wouldn’t scold him because it was a side effect of his new medication and we were supposed to be happy he could sit through his classes now without running out of the room to call her, begging her to pick him up and take him home.

  When I looked at him in his current state, with his glazed stare, I was nostalgic for the angry daggers he threw my way when I left for Paris. I worried for who we had become. And I wondered if I was medicating myself with my own half-life in Paris, the narcotic of romance, afforded by all the years our parents had starved to give me the privilege.

  After Mass, Beto held my arm as we walked down the path from the church to the parking lot, the chill burning our eyes. Our parents walked ahead of us, in matching steps, holding hands to keep each other from slipping on the dark ice.

  “It wasn’t only me having a hard time with you away,” Beto told me. “They were the ones crying. Especially Mami. Every day.”

  Our father was expressive and emotional, but our mother never shed tears, as though she’d never learned how. I was sure Beto was exaggerating.

  “I don’t believe you. She never cries.”

  “Santi says she never had to before because we were always there.”

  When I later asked Santi about it, he told me, “I keep having to explain to them that your self-discovery crap is an American thing. They’re just enduring it until you come back to us to do what you’re meant to do.”

  “And what’s that?”

  “What you’ve always done. Help Mami with her charity work and come work at Compa’ with Pa and me.”

  “Did they tell you that?”

  “They didn’t have to.”

  “But what if that’s not what I want?”

  “Oye, where’s your loyalty? You’re not an amoeba. You didn’t come into this world alone. Our viejos gave us so much, the least we can do is put everything we gained back into our own family. Jesus, Lita. You’re such a gringa sometimes.”

  “I just want to know, when exactly does my life belong to me?”

  “Are you kidding? Never.”

  On Christmas Day, the del Cielo house filled with dozens of friends eating, and singing along with guitars and accordions, the songs of our parents’ childhood. Our neighbor Abel got weepy every Christmas, after the first glass of wine, counting the family members he’d lost to war and disease, through the years of living an ocean apart, the wife he never found, the children he never had, saying immigration was a lonely business when you had nobody to share it with. By sunset he was moaning as he often did into
my father’s shoulder that when he was old and frail there would be no one to take care of him. He said he envied my father and may God have mercy on him for his terrible, terrible jealousy and greed, because he was a poor man who became a rich man only to learn that true fortune is family.

  By the end of the night, my parents, in the face of opulent gift-giving and extravagant quantities of food, began reminiscing about their former poverty, when they could live for a week on five dollars, made soups of whatever they could find so they could spend it on food for baby Santi, now six foot three, muscular, and clear eyed. I tried to picture Cato among us, tried to imagine how the worlds I’d tried to separate to this point would, if I let them, converge.

  My father woke each morning at five without an alarm and made rounds, checking on his sleeping children who were no longer children, made the first pot of coffee, fed the animals, then returned to his room to do calisthenics on the floor, concluding with fifty push-ups on his ever-shrinking biceps. When I was small, I’d wake as soon as I heard his footsteps and go sit on the floor and watch him, the straightness of his tan bare back sloping into his pajama pants, his thin arms pulsing under his body weight. It hurt me to watch him as he struggled through the last few presses, his face flushed, his neck veins bulging. It showed the limits of his strength and filled me with terror that someday something more powerful than my father might break him.

  That morning when I heard his soft steps on the wood floors, I got up to meet him in the hall and followed him around for his ritual. He whispered good morning to the dogs, who met his legs with affectionate nose rubs, the waiting cats, their tails popped like poles as he freshened their water bowls and replenished their food.

  He saw me standing in the doorway. “You’re still on Paris time, corazón?”

  “You know I’m an early riser, Pa.”

  I wanted to tell him about Cato but knew my father would say, “People don’t fall in love like it’s a hole in the ground. Love is not an accident. Love doesn’t arrive or drop from the sky like rain. Love is a carefully prepared meal between two people who will sit and eat together.”

  And a choice that should be made very carefully because, according to him, we are each the sum of the people we love. He chose my mother because they had lived a similar story, a blanket of hunger and shame covering each of their childhoods. Neither of them had anything, and they thought that, together, they might make something.

  “Only rich people and fools have time to sit around thinking about love. And we are not rich people no matter how much money we have to keep us from going hungry. We will always be poor people, and the day I or any of my children believe we are rich is the day we go blind and the day we go blind is the day I begin to die.”

  “How do you know when you’ve found love?” I’d asked my father many times throughout my childhood, trying to understand the mysterious fate that led my parents to each other.

  “There has to be a moment, Papi, when you’re sure of it, isn’t there?”

  “You don’t ‘find’ love, mi amor. You choose it. And then to keep love, you must choose it again, day after day.”

  When I called, Sharif told me Cato was awake most of the day now. He and the nurses mentioned I’d been there to see him but Cato didn’t respond.

  “He didn’t ask for me?”

  “No.” Sharif turned quiet and behind him I heard the noise of his household, in Goutte d’Or. “You have to understand, Lita. The last time this happened, the silence didn’t leave him for months.”

  By the time I returned to France, Cato was already home by the sea. I didn’t know how to contact him there, so I went on my own, boarding the train at Gare Saint-Lazare, hailing a taxi at the station in Calvados, guiding the driver to his house by memory since I didn’t have the address.

  He opened the door to me and there were no words. I rushed into him, his diminishing frame against my rib cage.

  “Please,” he spoke into my hair, “let’s not talk about it,” and though I wasn’t sure if he meant his illness or what had become of us in the silence of our time apart, I nodded.

  It was my first time in his bedroom. I remember thinking it had the feeling of a bunker. It faced the back of the house and had a large three-pane window with a view to the garden, which was often blocked by the thick toile curtains he’d open for only an hour a day to clear out the stale air. He didn’t care for daylight, and his room was further darkened by stacks of books and several wooden trunks pushed against the eggshell walls. A large map of the flattened earth was pinned to one, rumpled and sagging. The four-poster bed was neatly made with crisp white sheets and a navy coverlet. An old rotary telephone on the floor beside the bed attached to an answering machine. His shoes lined the wall by the door, an order to the disorder, even if my first sight of the room filled me with an overwhelming sorrow, as if he’d moved the totality of his life into these walls.

  He welcomed me, made room for me, by moving things aside and unfolding a rack for me to place my bag on, clearing space in his closet for me to hang the few clothes I’d brought with me. I went to the window and pushed the curtains apart. My first effort was to fill the room with the noise of conversation, ask for anecdotes about the origin of everything, and he obliged at first but became winded from speaking and eased himself onto the bed. I lay beside him. I kissed him, but he fell into a fit of coughs and I rushed down to the kitchen for a glass of water. I wanted it to be as it was before, to sleep naked with him, feel his skin, his hot breath, but it was cold both outside and in his room. We slept in sweaters and pants, our feet wrapped in thick wool socks his mother knitted long ago. I reached for him throughout the night. I didn’t sleep, but he did, heavily, and I resisted shaking him awake until morning bled into afternoon.

  I made a large breakfast of eggs, sausages, toast, and coffee. When a woman who lived down the road brought vegetables and food for him that morning, I met her at the door. She looked me over and asked how long I’d been working for Monsieur.

  “I’m not his employee,” I answered. “I’m his guest.”

  I tried to make light of it later, joking to Cato that maybe the woman with the vegetables thought I was his new governess.

  “It’s an understandable error. There has never been another girl who stayed here with me. You’re the first.”

  He sat at the table and faced my meal with resignation. He had little appetite and said his throat still ached from the tubes, his chest still burned with pressure. But he took a few bites of the eggs before pushing the plate away, promising he’d eat more later.

  While he rested in the afternoon, I cleaned the house, dusting the furniture and shelves, washing the windows and floors, exorcising as I fluffed the pillows and cushions, straightened the books and records. I found a bicycle in the garage covered in cobwebs, cleaned it, found an air pump in a junk pile and filled the tires. I rode down the pebbled road to the row of shops by the marina, a few people gathered around the wooden stand where the fishermen sold their daily catch. I waited my turn, then asked the fisherman for two fillets, but he pretended he couldn’t hear me and tended to a woman who arrived after me. I tried again, and again I was ignored. I pulled back and watched as each person in the small crowd was acknowledged and served, walking away with their paper-wrapped bundle of fish.

  I was used to living with a continuous case of mistaken identity. Not only in Paris when someone took me for a hooker or followed me around a store, but almost every time I got in a taxi, the driver, whether French, African, Spanish, Italian, or Arab, assumed I was a Maghreb girl. When I said I wasn’t, I’d often get hit with insults for denying my culture and thinking I was superior just because I was in France now. It wasn’t so different from life back home, growing up in an affluent yet sheltered ivory village, with no idea I wasn’t what the standardized forms called White until informed by my third-grade teacher. No one is born with the feeling of not belonging. It’s thrust upon us. But it was a condition I was already used to, and mos
t of the time I barely noticed it.

  But this time, I thought of Cato’s father. I’d decided I’d never tell Cato how he’d dismissed me from his home when I came to see him ill, but now, I felt the old man everywhere, in the faces of the market people, the fishmonger, the woman delivering the basket of vegetables, and their eyes deeming me unworthy, invisible. Yet it wasn’t hurt that I felt, but confusion, unsure if I was who I thought I was. But, I told myself, all that mattered was who Cato and I were in relation to each other.

  That night, I ran the hot water and let the bathroom fill with steam until the walls were covered in vapor. When the tub was full and warm, I invited him in and we both settled into the water, our legs tangled, knees peaking above the surface. I washed his hair. Ran the razor along his neck to his face until he was smooth all over, his eyes closed, cheeks soft and shiny. When I put down the blade, he smiled, moving forward to kiss me, but his coughing stopped him. I held him into my chest. We stayed this way until the water turned cold. I pulled myself out and let him look at me. The room glowed amber and gold as the bathwater dripped from my skin to the tile floor. Even in my room in Paris I’d always stayed in the shadows or with a sheet pulled over me. Here, I stood before him.

  I brought him a towel and held it as he climbed out of the tub, shivering into my arms. In the bed, he approached my body with new vigor, the sheets and blankets kicked to the floor. The moon shone through the curtains making an indigo valley of the bedroom, starlight carving out corners among the books and trunks, my flattened duffel bag forgotten on the floor.

  Weeks passed this way.

  I pretended I was a wife. I pretended he was my husband. I pretended one day there would be a child sleeping quietly on the bed between us.

  We began the New Year together, a Saint-Sylvestre feast for two of oysters and champagne, though we missed the strike of midnight by an hour, the house quiet except for our voices. I’ve never believed in resolutions, only in desires and decisions, and told him so, but did as I would have done at home with my family. The tradition was to coat the grapes in sugar and pluck and eat a succession of twelve at the midnight we’d claimed for ourselves. We didn’t share our wishes but swallowed them silently with our eyes on each other. We stayed awake until sunrise and put on our warmest clothes for a walk along the water’s edge, the beach barren as if we were the last, or first, people on earth.