It's Not Love, It's Just Paris

by Engel, Patricia

  I started to tell her I wasn’t like other girls and Cato wasn’t like other boys, but she held up her palm and told me in a voice that was both soft and severe, “I know you think you’re special. You’ve probably been told you were special all your life. But there’s a Lita in the House of Stars every year.”

  Séraphine sent for me. I curled into the violet armchair next to her bed and helped myself to one of her Dunhills. I waited for her to bait me for a confession but she only watched me, nodding her head with her slight, twitchy pulses. I looked around at the photographs lining the walls, a way for her to see her whole life in a tapestry every day. I used to think I wanted to be that way when I was old, surrounded by objects and artifacts from a life lived passionately and well, but now it seemed tragic: Séraphine, painted and immobile in her white bed mound, while the world danced on outside her doors. Somehow, I resented her at that moment.

  “You must be thrilled your prediction came true,” I said.

  “Prediction?”

  “You said he would leave me and you were right.”

  “Cynicism is an addictive pill, chérie. It doesn’t suit you.” She took a cigarette for herself, the lighter flame wobbling in her shaky hands. “Some people are gifted with love and don’t know what to do with it. They’re simply born to be alone. Love will always slip through their fingers like water.”

  “Am I one of those people?”

  I stood up and walked to the window; spikes of winter air vibrated against the glass. Across the garden, the stone bench where I’d sat with Cato the night of the first party was covered with broken twigs and bird shit.

  “No,” Séraphine said, “you never will be. You love fully. I saw this much in you. But it’s not love if you depend on a man to hold you up like a pillar. A woman must have roots in the earth, not wait for her lover to plant her in a beautiful clay pot. Yours was an honest mistake, chérie. If you had found a potent love earlier in life like some girls do at the age of thirteen or fourteen, you would be a very different woman.”

  “I was in love once.”

  “Were you?”

  “I thought I was.”

  “Well, then you should know young love is not meant to last. It’s just a glimmer that sets fire to a heart that will be repeatedly baptized with sorrows and abandonments until you arrive at the right love, which might not even be a love but more like a partnership, two people who fall into each other’s lives in a way that is comfortable and inevitable.”

  “That doesn’t sound very romantic.”

  “It’s not mean to be, chérie. In the end we all become closer to who we started out as in life than who we set out to be. The best thing one can do is accept the life that was claimed for you the second you were born. Dreaming is for children. And one day, after everything, you will wake up and realize you really haven’t suffered much at all.”

  I began walking the city trying to undo every step I’d taken with him at my side. I squinted against beastly white winter winds blowing off the Seine, walked along the quai all the way across to Place des Victoires, where I sat on the same curb to adjust the same leather boots I wore on our first outing.

  I passed through the passages of the Palais Royal, stopping at the precise spot where he fell ill, remembering the shadows of his body on the pavement.

  There were no brides and grooms posing for wedding photos beside the obelisk that day. No candied white gowns, tuxedos, or rose bouquets shedding petals in the street.

  On the Pont Alexandre, a Russian family asked me to take their picture. The parents hugged the children as they stood along the wall in front of one of the lanterns. When they left, I went to the statue where we’d stood together the day the rain came down. I found our names on the bronze covered by more recent signatures. A piece of us remained.

  I crossed Les Invalides up the boulevard to the Rodin Museum, passed through the galleries feeling more like a phantom than a person, out to the back garden, then moved slowly along the pebble paths watching lovers on the stone benches nuzzling each other, the sky darkening above. Before my tour was over I stopped in Chateaubriand’s park to find it vacant, free of children and the usual elderly ladies hunched over needlepoint, the solitary old men smoking cigarettes and staring up at the clouds as if they held some secret. I sat on my bench, where I came that first day to write postcards to my brother, staring across the path to where he’d once sat and watched me. I could see him, sitting, one leg crossed over another. His slanted shoulders, sheepish smile. The mussed hair, pearly skin. I heard his voice. Heard him say my name.

  Paris is a city of sidewalk love scenes any day of the year but on one February day, lovers become especially brazen, warmed over by some nuclear love bomb. You can’t walk two meters without witnessing a meeting of tongues, bodies wrapped so far into each other that it’s unclear where one ends and the other begins. In doorways, a guy standing before a girl with a bouquet in hand, anticipation all over his lips.

  Tarentina and I were the only dateless Valentine refugees in the house. In her case it was by choice because she rejected displays of sentimentality. I wanted to stay home locked in the cavern of my bedroom, replaying every conversation I’d had with Cato to myself, searching the pauses, hesitations, and ellipses for clues that he’d had a foot out the door, but she forced me out with her that night.

  She called Romain and asked him to hold us a table at Far Niente even though I hadn’t opened the door for him when he came by a few days earlier to read Martin Eden, because I suspected he’d greet me with some sort of lecture. The House of Stars rumors were never restricted to only our walls, and the Far Niente waiters all knew Cato had split on me. Romain positioned my chair so my back was to the room full of couples, but when the violinist the boss had hired for the night began to play the opening bars of “Speak Softly Love,” Tarentina ordered Romain to get the vino flowing.

  Around midnight I went to the ladies’ room and took a long look at myself in the mirror. I usually avoided mirrors. My mother would scold me for looking at my reflection too long as if she didn’t want me to know myself too well. But this mirror in the tiny red bathroom of Far Niente seduced me into its shiny metal frame. I stared at myself, noticing new lines around my eyes and lips, my pasty complexion, my eyes droopier than I’d ever realized and, tonight, puffed like profiteroles with pink and purple fatigue marks pressed into the corners. I wondered if this was the same face Cato saw when he lay across from me in bed, when he kissed me.

  I didn’t know my face anymore and was unsure that I’d ever known it. During those months I thought it was enough to see myself through his eyes. I thought he saw someone special, beautiful, worthy of love. En route to the restaurant I’d felt the pavement belonged to him, stretches of rue du Bac he’d already claimed with me or on his way to me. The inky sky above was his, and now I felt an imposter in his country, each hour borrowed against hope that he’d reappear.

  Someone knocked on the bathroom door. I said I’d be out in a minute, and when I opened it there was Romain looking ravenous, blocking me so that I couldn’t step out past him but he could step in. There the kisses began. I don’t remember the first one, just the succession that followed, the sloppy mouths finding each other, my disorientation as I forgot where I was, opening my eyes to an inch of myself reflected in the mirror, my face obscured by his curls, my body shrinking within his. It may have been seconds or minutes—I couldn’t determine—before I stopped him as he started to unbutton my blouse. He didn’t resist, seeming pleased to have gotten this far. We faced each other. His palms rested on my hips while I folded my arms against my chest.

  Back at the table I drank more wine. Tarentina didn’t let on that she noticed my flushed face or swollen lips. She was talking about Loic, how he’d fallen for a Jamaican ballerina named Corinne who’d come by the house asking if there were any open rooms for rent. She’d just been kicked out of the apartment she shared with her boyfriend on rue de Passy and heard about the House of Stars from a
friend of a friend. Loic took her number and helped her find a chambre de bonne on rue Vaugirard through one of his contacts and, miserly as he was, had reserved a table at La Tour d’Argent to take her for a Valentine’s dinner.

  It was late. I told Tarentina I wanted to go home. We were the last people in the restaurant. Even the toothless homeless man had already come for his meal and gone. Romain had changed out of his apron and black shirt into his regular clothes. When he saw us get up to leave I could tell he was just waiting for the invitation. I looked at him and he looked at me and Tarentina pretended to look away. We walked out the door and he followed. Tarentina kept a few steps ahead and Romain walked beside me, his fingers gliding against mine, trying to find a place within them, but I kept pulling them away. Maybe it was the cocktail of wine and woe, the stench of romance rising from the concrete. I should have told him to leave that night but couldn’t. I didn’t want to be alone.

  When we were in my bedroom and Tarentina had closed the door to hers, I told him he could stay the night if he wanted. He could even sleep in my bed, but we would only sleep. As I said the words I believed them, and by the way he stared at me, nodding, I thought he believed me, too.

  I can’t remember what his kisses felt like because I was numb, or my lips were, maybe from all the alcohol. I only remember that I wondered, with his body over me, trying to push my thighs apart with his knees while I resisted and kept them sealed, if I could make him my surrogate for the body I really longed for that night. I wanted to touch him, but my arms were heavy, so I lay limp, trying to respond with my lips, hoping that kissing him would keep the room from spinning, but after a few minutes I couldn’t take it anymore, pushed him off me, and ran down the hall to the bathroom to vomit.

  When I came back to my room, Romain was on the floor, using his shirt as a pillow. I stepped over him to get back into my bed and was just beginning to fall asleep when I heard him whisper, either to me or to himself, “We always want the ones who don’t want us.”

  14

  I met Pascal one night when Tarentina took me to a private party at the Musician’s place. Pascal was a stringy blond and sat next to me on a purple velvet sofa after Tarentina disappeared to one of the bedrooms with the Musician, leaving me in a room full of strangers. It was the first time I’d seen the Musician in person, and it was hard to separate the man from the stories I’d been told about him. How he’d been inviting Tarentina to join him on tour since she was seventeen and showered her with vacations and gifts. The songs he’d written, including one about a Brazilian orphan girl that went on to become one of the biggest hits of his career. Yet she claimed he was a sad man, and alone in his room he looked much older than his fifty-five years with a sunken chest and rodent-like curve to his back that he concealed with gypsy blouses, leather jackets, and long robes. She swore their relationship didn’t involve much sex, maybe because of his age or because he got enough of it elsewhere, but something kept him hooked on Tarentina. She said everyone else hassled him too much, always asking for money or favors, not just the industry people but his family back in his Belgravia mansion, and when it was just the two of them, he was happy to let Tarentina be the star.

  One of the Musician’s regular guests, Tarentina had pointed out, was Dominique’s father, a bloated, graying goateed man with his hands on the hips of a young miniskirted model, and that was the reason she never brought the other girls along with her to these parties no matter how much they begged for an invitation.

  Pascal only went by his first name and was a singer-songwriter and protégé of the Musician, discovered while performing for change in the Charing Cross tube station in London. Pascal inched his way over from his end of the sofa and offered me a cigarette—Chesterfields—trying the line on me that I looked like one of Gauguin’s Tahitian girls, which I ignored, and instead pulled out my own pack of smokes, but Pascal was undeterred.

  He said I had the face of a stranger, and he was a stranger, too. Though he could easily pass for continental French he was actually a Caribbean boy, the son of a fifth-generation Martiniquaise, raised in Margot until sent at sixteen to finish school in Limoges.

  “And what are you doing in Paris?” he asked me.

  He was a good-looking, well-styled vagabond, in torn jeans and silver rings on too many knuckles.

  “I’m in school,” I lied, because it was easier than explaining that I’d dropped out and my only work was running a term-paper mill, though it paid for the new dress and high-heel leather boots I was wearing that night, as well as the lace bra and panties Tarentina convinced me to buy at Sabbia Rosa because she said my clothes were so dull she couldn’t stand to wonder what I wore underneath.

  “I’m at the Sorbonne.” And that was only a relative fib because some afternoons I crashed lectures there since they didn’t take attendance or check IDs. It was part of my recent plan of self-education. I knew my months in Paris were coming to a close, so I’d assigned myself a list of cultural excursions, from the Chapelle Expiatoire to the Cimetière des Chiens, Rouen, and the Loire. But nights were still a lonely matter, so I accepted almost any invitation that came to me, falling into Giada’s crowd of party people, following her favorite DJs from club to club or on a blind double date with a pair of Oliviers who took us to that fondue place in Montmartre where they serve wine in baby bottles.

  Sometimes the couples took me into their care. Saira and Stef invited me to dinner and to the movies with them, and Naomi dragged me along to Rachid’s boxing matches in Aubervilliers and Clichy-sous-Bois. But nights out with Tarentina were always the biggest production, with her two hours of primping that included music, stretches, and the practicing of smiles, pouts, and scowls in the mirror because, she said, the easiest way to seduce a man is make him a little afraid of you.

  “With the right glance, you can make a man doubt every choice he’s made in his life and make him yours for as long as you want him.”

  And maybe she was right because the more I behaved indifferently to Pascal, the more he seemed to care about impressing me.

  Tarentina stayed with the Musician that night and Pascal offered to drive me home.

  “I’ve been here before, years ago,” he said when he pulled his Citroën up to our green doors. “I came to a few parties here. It’s called the Dollhouse or something, no?”

  “The House of Stars.”

  “Right, right.”

  I didn’t look at him until I was out of the car, thanking him for the ride. I felt foolish. I didn’t know how to handle these sorts of moments.

  Tarentina agreed that I needed guidance. She arranged for us to run into each other a few more times, at nightclubs and bars, when I realized I’d been paired off with him, and she with the Musician. Pascal was full of plans, telling me in detail about the album he was recording with the Musician as producer, performing in local showcases, planning a tour in Japan that fall after a two-month retreat to his favorite ashram in Rajasthan. He was a “Nowhere Man,” as the girls called such rootless wanderers. He’d spent years traveling in South America with his guitar on his back, and even passed through my namesake, Leticia. Tarentina believed he was the antidote to Cato, bound to his little cottage by the sea. I made an effort to like Pascal, who, for some reason, treated me as if I fascinated him. But as we sat around a tiny table at Castel’s one night, I complained to Tarentina that I felt entirely absent, a mere prop of a girl.

  “That’s part of the process, darling,” she told me. “You have to train yourself to be with another man. Everyone does it. You’ll get used to it.”

  I invited Pascal to Florian’s gallery reception for the unveiling of Maribel’s painting, as yet Untitled. Every year he picked one student to show their work alongside his, and this time she received the honor, though it wasn’t free of rumors about their affair and favoritism because of her parents’ fame. When we all arrived for the reception, she led us around the gallery, past Florian’s paintings to the far wall where her piece hung under a row of t
rack lights, an amalgam of dark tones stippled with paler tinges, shapeless forms woven together that didn’t follow any logic I could identify. Maribel said logic was the enemy of creation and a painting should never be literal, because our minds and souls are not literal.

  “So I guess you won’t explain it to us then?” Camila asked on behalf of our cluster, but Maribel scoffed that an artist should never be asked to explain. To explain is to justify and to justify means one fears judgment, and doubt alone will destroy any chance a work has of being authentic.

  The others moved on to look at Florian’s paintings, and Pascal and I stopped by the bar. We took our wineglasses to a corner of the gallery, and he brushed a runaway strand of hair from my face, the intimacy of his gesture startling me, which I think he noticed because he pulled back and slipped his hand in his pocket.

  We formed a little wall, speaking of the others, observing them together. Across the gallery Florian held court over a crowd of art folk, while photographers flashed away. He and Maribel avoided each other, while Eliza fluttered about the room; an ever-tan song of a woman who I heard left two children behind in Tarragona years ago to be with Florian in France. That made me curious about her. I wondered to what degree a woman had to love a man in order to leave her children and country for him. Maybe it was like Séraphine once said: The reason the end of love, the severing of intimacy, what in Spanish we call desamor, is so painful is that romantic love is but a cult of one.

  That and that each of us gambles our life on what we believe to be the truth.

  I thought of the night I was introduced to Florian, how I’d stood on the edge of his boat looking across the water at the lights on the other side of Paris.