It's Not Love, It's Just Paris

by Engel, Patricia

  But my family wanted to know the life I lived away from them. They wanted to see Séraphine’s house, my bedroom, meet the people I lived with. I held them off for a few days. Séraphine was in with one of her doctors, so she couldn’t receive my parents, but Loic came out to greet them, speaking wonders of me and how delighted the de la Roques were to have me under their roof. My mother produced a small box from her handbag, delicately wrapped with a card attached, a gift of a silver pillbox engraved with her name, for Séraphine.

  I showed them around the house and gardens. Santi and Beto whispered that I lived in a dump, while my parents complimented the lovely architectural details, the elaborate (broken) moldings, the intricate Persian (hole-laden) rugs. I’d buried all of Cato’s clothes in the back of my closet, and my room was as neat and clean for their arrival as it had ever been, but the photographs Naomi had taken of Cato and me together at Far Niente, and on a house outing to Chambord, remained tacked to the wall, and my parents and brothers noticed them, without comment. Since I’d told her about him, my mother had kept mum about Cato and never asked about him during any of our phone calls, as if she could will him away with her indifference.

  Loic spread the word that my family was in the house. Maribel was at the studio, but Naomi and Saira quickly appeared on the landing just outside my room to introduce themselves. Dominique also came by, ever so polite, and Giada, fresh out of the shower, descended the stairs in nothing but a towel.

  “How lovely to meet you all,” my mother said and gave them each a hug.

  I should have known the girls would flock to Santi. Camila was the first, but she was no match for Tarentina, who, upon seeing him, stared at me as if I were guilty of some terrible betrayal for hiding him this long. She met him with her expertly coy routine, and Santi, of course, never turned down gratuitous flirting.

  My parents invited each of them to join us for dinner, and one by one, they graciously, thankfully, declined.

  Except Cato, whom we finally found in the foyer as we were heading out. I hadn’t expected they’d meet this way. I was still trying to invent the perfect scene for their first encounter, but here it was all at once: my family, the tall black-haired bunch surrounding Cato, pale and gaunt, his hair still uncombed from the morning.

  “This is my friend Cato. He’s in town for a while.”

  My mother’s brows went up slightly but she didn’t let on. All these days, not a mention of him from her side or mine.

  My father shook his hand, every young man a nephew, a sort of son.

  “I once knew a Gato Gonzales from Brooklyn. Any relation to you?”

  “It’s Cato, Papi,” I corrected with a hard C sound.

  “Is that Greek?” That was Santi.

  “I don’t really know,” Cato said.

  “It’s a nickname,” I was irritated. “We all have them.”

  “Short and sharp,” my father took over. “Just the way I like it. My name is Alberto but I’ve only ever been called Beto with a B. Nice to meet you, hijo. Are you joining us for dinner?”

  Papi called everyone hijo or hija but I could tell Cato was taken aback.

  “Yes, sir. I’d like that very much. Thank you.”

  We took two taxis. I rode with Cato and my mother. She watched the city lights outside the window, not a sound between us but the faint hum of Radio Nova.

  Cato cleared his throat, “Are you enjoying your time in Paris, Mrs. del Cielo?”

  She didn’t understand him the first time, with his accented English and her accented ear. I repeated the question in Spanish.

  “It’s beautiful.” She sounded shy, little-girl-like, watching the building facades go by like a film.

  The concierge sent us to some fancy place in the First, way too stuffy for our tastes, decorated in various tones of green, and nearly empty and overstaffed, which made the waiters all the more attentive.

  “We should have taken them to Far Niente instead,” I told Cato as we were quietly analyzing the menu around the large round table, the waiters watching us like bodyguards.

  Beto leaned into my shoulder. “Is this guy supposed to be your boyfriend or something?”

  I nodded, and he mumbled to Santi on his other side, “Affirmative.”

  Santi let out a low laugh that made everyone look up from their menu, and I knew everything was about to turn.

  Their first tactic in exclusion was to speak only in Spanish, and when I interjected that we should stick to English tonight, Santi gave Cato a puzzled, “What? You don’t speak Spanish? How is that possible?”

  “He does,” I said, “as well as you speak French,” because Santi hated being reminded of what he wasn’t good at.

  My mother also kept to her mother tongue, but my father tried, as he would toward any friend of mine, to engage Cato in English, ask him about his studies, his work, what he did with his free time.

  Cato told him how he lived on the coast and worked with boats at the marina.

  “Hijo, would you believe I didn’t see the ocean until I was twenty years old? And that was just from the plane. We didn’t make it to a real beach until we took the kids to the Rockaways many years later. When I saw all that water, I thought I was in heaven.”

  “That’s a beach in New York,” I told Cato.

  “Y esta muchchita, this one right here,” my father pointed to me, “she hated the ocean when we first put her in the water. She hit the waves, smacked them, furious the water was touching her. She refused to even put her little feet on the sand.”

  Cato turned to me, amused. “You hated the beach?”

  “I was a baby,” I said. “Obviously I grew to love it.”

  And then Santi took over. “Did you know my sister almost got married? It wasn’t even that long ago.”

  “That’s not true,” I said.

  “I was sure she was going to go through with it. They were so in love. Isn’t that right, Beto?”

  Beto, the traitor, nodded.

  “I couldn’t stand the guy back then but I kind of miss him now,” Santi said trying to sound nostalgic. “Lita broke his heart. Devastated the guy. Practically ruined his life.”

  Our parents did nothing to stop their performance. Papi only looked a little bored by their banter and pulled a piece of bread from the basket. My mother stared back at me with surrender.

  “Lita’s always been a girl who can’t be held down. She even refused to work in the family business … she has told you about our family business, hasn’t she?”

  Cato nodded, though I’d described it more like a family-owned grocery store and less like a multinational corporation.

  “Always Lita with her big dreams, talking about being a diplomat, moving from country to country, tasting different cultures like they’re a slice of cake.”

  “Would you cut it out?”

  “This is a free country, isn’t it?” Santi laughed. “I mean, we all know France is full of neo-fascists, but a guy like me can still speak his mind, no? No offense to you, Gato, my friend.”

  “It’s Cato,” I said sharply. “Get it right.”

  The waiters appeared with the first course. I watched Cato face his soup, wish bon appétit to the table, though my brothers had already started eating.

  The rest of the meal followed the same pattern. During dessert, when my father looked at me from across the table and told me I looked more like my mother than ever—his way of saying pretty—Santi reminded everyone of how I was often mistaken for a boy until I was about ten years old. Santi also pointed out that even though I’d skipped two years of school—second and fifth grade, which he said were no big deal because they were just “filler” years—I’d still never managed to be first in my class like he always was. And when he wasn’t taking direct aim at me, Santi, with the help of Beto, guided the dinner conversation out of Cato’s reach to home, and to people he did not know.

  When it was over, we split into two taxis again. This time Cato and I rode with my father. Cato thanked h
im for dinner, and we dropped him on the corner of rue de Bellechasse so it would appear he was staying elsewhere.

  “Let us know if you come to the States one day,” Papi told him as he stepped out of the cab onto the sidewalk. “We’d love to have you over to our home. You ever been to the U.S.?”

  “No, sir. Never.”

  “No? Well, you’ll have to put that on your list. Things to do before you die.”

  My father held my hand across the leather seat as we continued back to the House of Stars. “Parece un buen muchacho, tu amigo. Kind of quiet. But a good handshake.”

  We were quiet the rest of the way until the taxi pulled up in front of the house and my father, as we pulled apart from our hug good night, said in a heavy tone so it came off more like an order than advice, “Mi amor, watch yourself.”

  “I always do, Papi.”

  “No, corazón,” he shook his head, “I mean really watch yourself.”

  Cato arrived a short while later. I was already under the duvet. He pulled off his sweater, kicked off his shoes, and dropped into bed beside me. I wanted to apologize for the night, but how could I apologize for my own family? It felt like a betrayal.

  He wrapped me into his arms from behind, pushed in close, and we lay quietly until he finally said, “Your parents are very nice. Your brothers seem nice, too.”

  I breathed. I told myself they weren’t so bad. An average family. Certainly no worse than his father.

  “It must feel good to have siblings. Having someone, in your case two, to share everything with. It must make a lot of things easier. I can’t imagine it.”

  I was silent. It seemed he wanted to say more but was stopping himself. After a while he said, “You look so much like your mother, like she had you alone.”

  “I’m sure my father had something to do with it.”

  “I wish I could see that house you grew up in. With all the people and animals.”

  “You will. One day. Maybe in the summer you could come back with me.”

  “I haven’t been on a plane since I was a child.”

  “No?”

  “I’ve been on helicopters with my father. But no more planes. After I got sick the doctors said it would be too much of a risk with my lungs.”

  And then, as if he were talking only to himself, “I always thought life is long. I’ll have time for all the things I wish I could do. But I turn around and ten years have disappeared, as if they never were at all.”

  “There’s time,” I said. “There is always time.” But I wasn’t sure what we were talking about anymore.

  “Do you still want to do all those things your brother said you wanted to do?”

  I nodded. “In a different way. But I still have big dreams.”

  “What are they?”

  “To see the world. To do something meaningful.”

  “Promise you’ll do those things. With me or without me.”

  “I promise. But you have to promise the same.”

  “I already know I can’t do everything I wish I could do.”

  “You can do anything you want.” Those were words I’d been raised on, but when I said them to Cato, I knew he didn’t believe me.

  We were quiet together for a long time before we fell asleep. That night I dreamed of his house by the sea, and in the morning when we woke I told him that as soon as my family was gone, I wanted to go back there with him.

  Tarentina said Santi couldn’t leave without experiencing a proper night out in Paris. She enlisted most of the girls, and even Loic and Rachid, but Cato stayed back at the house. I was convinced we were having fun. My brother was the center of attention, just as he was accustomed to being, but once he was hopped up on vodka, he went right for the probe, grabbing my elbow, shouting in my ear under the thundering nightclub bass that I was wasting my time with Cato.

  I’d spent the day with my family. The snow had cleared, sun had broken through, and it was unusually warm. We’d walked through the Luxembourg Gardens, visited the catacombs and the miracle church, where my mother dragged Beto down to his knees at the altar. I said a few prayers of my own, mostly of gratitude. My brothers hadn’t said another word about Cato and I’d forgiven them, even decided their possessive behavior had been kind of cute.

  But it was just like Santi to wait until all was forgiven to ambush me.

  Tarentina was on his other arm trying to pull him from the table to the dance floor, but he shook her off gently and stayed firm at my side.

  “What are you going to do? Pack him up and bring him home with you? You two have nothing in common besides your puppy eyes for each other. That’s not enough to get you to the fucking corner.”

  I tried to ignore him but Santi rotated me by the shoulders to face him.

  “You’re forgetting who you are, Lita. Let me remind you our parents took their first ride on an airplane as guests of a pair of dogs.”

  “You don’t need to remind me of that.”

  “Oh, I do. I see that you think you’re like your fancy friends now. This is their world. You, hermanita, are just passing through. And everyone knows it but you.”

  “This,” he motioned to the club, the crowd around us, “this is not your life. This country is not your maldito country. That decaying blueblood tenement you’re living in is not your home. We are your home.”

  13

  With my family departed, we’d planned to go to Calvados for the weekend. Our bags were packed. Rather, one bag was packed with both our things. I took pride in that detail as I stood over the bed, folding his clothes with mine, accommodating our things the way we’d made room for each other in our lives and learned to fit together. He spoke from behind me, said my name in a tone I’d never heard from him, even and unfeeling, full of stillness as if he were alone in the room and practicing a line, not speaking it to me.

  “Lita. I think I should go home alone.”

  I waited a moment before turning around to face him.

  “What did you say?”

  “I think I should be alone at my house for a while. And I think you should stay here.”

  There was a new remoteness in his gaze.

  “I think … I think it’s the best thing for us.”

  I responded by pulling my clothes from his, placing them on the bed beside the bag. There was less to unpack than I thought.

  When I was through, he touched my arm. “Maybe you can come next weekend.”

  “It sounds like you don’t want me there.”

  “It’s not that I don’t want you there …” There was burden in his voice.

  I sat down beside my little pile.

  “I thought you were happy all this time.”

  “I was. I am.”

  “Don’t say we’ll see each other again if that’s not what you want.”

  “It’s not that I don’t want to see you, Lita.”

  “Then what is it?”

  “I just think it will be easier if we stop things now.”

  “Easier than what?” I hated the scorn in my voice.

  Cato shuffled his feet against the rug and let out a long sigh.

  “We don’t talk about it, but you know you’re going to leave in a few months. And you know I can’t go with you. We’re just prolonging things.”

  “I wasn’t as sure about my leaving as you seem to be.”

  “I just want to do the logical thing.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Don’t make me say it.”

  “You’re going to have to because I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Lita, we don’t make sense. Anybody can see that about us.” But the voice I heard was not his. It could have belonged to my brother, his father, Séraphine, or any of the girls in the house, but I knew it did not originate with him.

  “Walk away then,” I said coolly, with too much pride to show I was crumbling. “Leave right now if that’s what makes sense to you.”

  To my surprise, he did.

  Of course I cried. U
ntil my eyes swelled and my face ached. In English the word for crying feels trite, empty. The Spanish llorando is so much better. To say it feels like a cry, the way you have to open up your mouth and throat, concluding on the tip of the tongue, the back of the teeth. The French pleurer sounds too pretty, restrained, a costume of sadness.

  I wanted to invent a new word for crying without tears. That broken feeling. The disillusion.

  On the third day, I finally opened the door to Tarentina. She pulled me out of my bed and into her arms, wiped my face clean, brushed my hair, and told me, in her Tarentina way of talking about love like a clinician, that men are capable of astonishing tenderness without feeling a single ounce of love, and those who do feel love usually don’t have the faintest idea how to express it.

  “I saw this coming, Lita, but I didn’t want to spoil your fun. Had you asked for my advice I would have told you to withhold your affections a bit. Not be so available, serving yourself up like an apple-mouthed roasted pig. Men can take only so much beauty before they run. They’re not women, you know.”

  “So it’s my fault? I’m the one who failed?”

  “No, of course not. He’s right. You two don’t make sense. But look at the bright side. You got what you came to Paris for, no?”

  Tarentina’s theory was that parents sent their daughters to Europe not to be educated but to get the thirst for love affairs out of their system so they can return home exhausted and disheartened enough to slip into the roles outlined for them since birth. She said a daughter is a father’s primary investment, and all of us, except her, because she was fatherless, were a bunch of clipped-wing canaries. Sooner or later each of us would return home to our safe small lives, marry the boy who’d been picked out for us, and relegate memories of our Paris days to a quiet trove of photographs and diaries hidden in the back of a closet.

  “None of the relationships in this house would ever translate to real life,” she said. “These love affairs can only exist here. At the end of each séjour there are always tears and heavy promises, but there comes a time when every girl does as she’s told, packs up her things, returns home, and leaves that lover behind. You’d have done the same, darling. Trust me. Count yourself lucky that your Cato said good bye before you had to. You’ll have less regret that way.”