It's Not Love, It's Just Paris

by Engel, Patricia

  And Cato, by the torch, out of the shadows and into the streetlights on the long walk home.

  I tried to stop my thoughts, but in the gallery, no matter which way I turned for diversion, from the faces of the people, to the ambiguous artwork, and to Pascal next to me, waiting for some kind of signal that I was ready for him to kiss me, all thoughts led me back to Cato.

  Pascal took my hand.

  “Are you all right?”

  “I need some air.” It wasn’t a dizzying sensation that came over me but a sudden clarity that I was in the wrong place.

  We went out to the sidewalk. He lit a cigarette and leaned against the building while I stopped on the curb, looking to the darkened storefronts across the street. I saw a familiar body walk by in clinging black attire. I was sure it was Sharif, the midnight ninja out for a night tagging the city, and called his name but he didn’t hear me.

  “You know him?” Pascal was surprised but I was already crossing the street, following the guy down the opposite sidewalk, calling after him until he finally turned around and barked, “What do you want?” into my face.

  “I’m sorry,” I said and backed up right into Pascal. “I thought you were someone else.”

  “Lita.” Pascal put an arm around me and led me back to the gallery. “Why don’t we get out of here? We can go to my place, or yours if you want.”

  His arm was still around me as we sat in the back of the taxi, yet everything about the night felt wrong, and it was only when we arrived at the House of Stars and faced each other on the sidewalk, when he told the taxi driver to keep the meter running, before giving me a single kiss on the cheek and telling me with a blend of kindness and restraint to “take care,” that I knew Pascal felt it, too.

  And then I saw it. The form of a man’s body sitting in the shadows of the stone steps. Loic and Gaspard were still at the gallery. It was someone else.

  I stopped walking, halfway across the entrance court.

  He leaned into the stream of moonlight.

  Cato.

  I’d stopped hoping for a moment like this, and now that it was here, I tried to muster indifference, so he wouldn’t see that despite two months of silence, I only wanted to run to him.

  “Don’t tell me you’re lost.”

  “No. I’m waiting for someone.”

  “The others are all at Maribel’s show in the Marais.”

  I stopped just short of the stairs where he sat.

  “I didn’t come here for any of them.”

  “Who did you come here for then?”

  “I came to see you.”

  “Well, here I am.” I started up the steps toward the door but he caught my hand.

  “Lita, sit with me a minute. Please.”

  I took a deep breath, as if that would give me fuel, and sat a palm’s width from him, wanting to close my eyes and forget he left that day—rip myself away from this moment, where we sat as new strangers.

  “What is it you need to say?” It was easier to keep my eyes to the ground.

  “I’ve been wanting to tell you … I tried to pretend we never met.”

  Me too, I wanted to say, but only because he’d given me no other choice.

  “I thought it would be easier if I left you to be free to have fun with your friends, enjoy the rest of your time in Paris without being stuck with me.”

  “I never felt stuck with you.”

  “I’ve been alone so long. It’s the only way I know how to be,” he spoke to the wind in a near whisper, steady and slow as if he’d practiced what he’d say.

  “I know you came to see me when I was sick. And then one day you were gone.”

  “Your father told me not to come back.”

  “I know.”

  “And it was Christmas. I went to see my family. I came to see you as soon as I returned. Don’t you remember?”

  “Yes, yes. But that’s what I’m trying to tell you. Everything that matters to you is in another country. No matter what, this is going to end with one of us leaving the other.”

  “You mean me.”

  “It has to be you. I’ll always be here.”

  “You talk like you’re sentenced to the life you have.”

  “I don’t have the freedom you have. My body isn’t strong enough to jump around the world like you can.”

  “What if I stayed?”

  Cato met my eyes, just as surprised as I was by my words.

  “If you stayed, it would be … different.”

  We were quiet until the space shrank between us and I felt his side against mine, his arm reaching around me.

  “Cato, what did you come here for?”

  “I came for you.” His breath warmed my cheek when he spoke.

  “Are you sure that’s what you want?”

  “You are what I want. I’ll take however many days we have left together, if you’ll take me.”

  And like that, it was undone, and we were restored, or so I believed.

  Cato departed again a week later, this time with me at his side on the morning train back to the house by the sea. We opened the windows and cleaned together, making it ours again. I went with him to look in on some of the boats he took care of, bobbing like tops in the harbor. I liked watching him. There on the boat deck he was strong. He pulled heavy levers and hooks, hauled piles, and pushed loads with no indication he’d ever been weakened by sickness. Here, he was a magician, the wind roping through his hair, handling a piece of engineering, and with a flick of his hand the sail went up, swift like a handkerchief.

  One afternoon Cato prepared the vegetables left at the door by the lady from down the road, and I took the bicycle to the marina to get the fish for dinner from a friendlier fisherman I’d discovered farther down the docks—a Brit from Dover who’d made the crossing for a woman in Honfleur he’d met and married through an ad. I pedaled down the muddy trail easily, as if I’d done so all my life.

  This life with him, the marriage of the landscape with our new routines, seemed paradisiacal to me. It didn’t even bother me that in his village people still stared at me when Cato and I walked around together holding hands as if I’d taken one of their own hostage.

  That day, I thought I could get used to Cato’s small town.

  I believed I could live there. If only he would ask me.

  And then he did.

  We lay on the floor of the room in his house with the books, though this time, the fireplace was cool and empty. There was no music, only the first sounds of spring, birds outside the window.

  “If you wanted,” he started carefully, “instead of going home this summer, you could stay in France longer. In Paris. Or … you could stay here … with me.”

  I wanted him to be sure of what he was asking, and he must have known, because he offered something of a plan.

  “You could find a job here easily with your English, or you could study at the university. Not forever. I know you have other plans for your life. But for a while longer. For as long as you like.”

  I was relieved to hear he wanted me beyond the expiration of my carte de séjour. Though if I didn’t officially maintain a student visa, I’d have to leave and return as a visitor, or stay on, illegally.

  I watched him sleep easily that night in his own bed, searching the shadows of the room for a sign, a rune cast in the moonlight over the chipping paint of the walls. I tried to envision a new life. I could find work translating, teaching English, or tutoring. I figured the countryside might be less competitive than Paris and already knew I could find plenty of work writing academic papers for lazy students. I could look after somebody’s kids. I could take up another degree in some kind of French history at the Université de Caen, like he said.

  But to go anywhere, to begin again, one must leave something behind.

  My family. My home.

  He pulled me close.

  “I love you, Lita.”

  He said it first in French, then English, and Spanish, and the words pushed deeper
, but I stopped him, “Don’t say that,” because it didn’t matter the language; they weren’t the words I wanted.

  “What should I say then?”

  “Don’t say you love me. Say you choose me.”

  “I choose you.”

  “And say it again every day.”

  When we returned to Paris we found an ambulance parked inside the courtyard, the front doors to the House of Stars wide open with a group of paramedics standing around the foyer while the other girls arranged themselves on the stairs to take in the show below. Cato and I took a place among them.

  Earlier that night, as Violeta helped her get ready for bed, Séraphine had fainted, sliding off her mattress onto the floor. By the time the medics arrived, she was lucid and forbade them to take her to the hospital. The ambulance workers stood around waiting for a decision to be made while Loic and Gaspard tried to convince their grandmother to let herself be examined, but all the girls heard was her howling echo against the marble of the foyer.

  “Leave me in my house! Leave me!”

  Loic appeared, a hand on his temple.

  “She won’t go. She absolutely refuses.”

  As if she heard him, Séraphine shouted from her room, “I will not leave my house! Leave me in my house!”

  “At least we know she’s not short of breath,” Tarentina offered, but the medics ignored her and warned Loic she needed to be seen by specialists, not just the doctors that came for house calls and to deliver prescriptions.

  Loic and Gaspard looked at each other. It was the first time I saw any shred of fraternal union between them.

  “I’m sorry to waste your time,” Gaspard said. “There’s nothing to be done. She won’t let herself be taken from her house.”

  When they’d cleared out, Tarentina asked if we could go in and see Séraphine while Cato waited in the foyer with the other guys.

  That night we saw Séraphine free of artifice, in her eyelet nightgown, face wiped clean of her lotions, tints, and pigments, just the vague outline of kohl liner. Her long white hair was brushed smooth, parted in the middle, falling to her elbows, though the fat bun she often wore turned out to be a hairpiece now lying in a neat bundle on her bedside table.

  She pulled the blanket above her chest when she saw our cluster inch through her doorway.

  “Don’t tell me they’ve sent you all in here to try to convince me to go,” she said.

  “No, the medics have all left,” Tarentina assured her. She went to Séraphine’s side, holding her hand while the rest of us crowded around her bed. “We just want to make sure you’re all right.”

  “My darling girls,” she sighed, “nothing good comes from being old.”

  “Maybe you should consider going to the hospital sometime, not today, of course, so they can take a look at your heart,” Giada tried.

  “Why? To help me die faster?”

  “They can do tests and find ways to make you more comfortable.”

  “Chérie, when people my age go to the hospital they don’t come out.”

  She set her stare back on Tarentina, clutching her hand tighter and pulling it to her chest.

  “I will die in this house.” She closed her eyes.

  “Don’t talk like that.” Tarentina lowered herself to sit on the bed at her side.

  “This house is mine to die in. It’s what I want.”

  “You still have many years ahead of you.”

  “Please, Chérie. Time forgives no one.” She let go of Tarentina’s hand and stared at the photographs on her walls as if they held answers, her eyes bluer than ever.

  “Do you have any idea how many girls have passed through this house?”

  We were all silent.

  “I’ll tell you. There have been hundreds of you. Hundreds.”

  She reached for her cigarettes but thought better of it and dropped her silver case on the floor with resignation.

  “Some girls stayed a few months. Some for a year or two or three.” She looked at Tarentina. “Or five. You become my daughters. You become my heart. And when you leave do you know how many return to see me? Do you know how many write me a letter or offer me a phone call? Can you guess how many? In all my decades opening my house to you girls full of your passions and dreams, maybe two or three. To all the rest, I am forgotten.”

  “Séraph—” Tarentina started but Séraphine cut her off.

  “My house will become a story you will tell your husbands and children and friends at dinner parties. My little birds, mark my words, you will soon leave me and you will forget me. But this is natural. It’s to be expected. I have given you my house but my house belongs only to me. And no matter what anyone says, because they think I am an old woman and this gives them the right to tell me what to do, I will remain here in my house because it is my right and it is what I desire, until my last breath.”

  15

  Cato presented the idea as his father’s initiative.

  “My father invited us to spend Easter Sunday with him.”

  “Are you sure he meant both of us?” I was incredulous.

  “Yes, he asked specifically that you come. We’ll join him for Mass first and go to his home afterward for lunch. What do you think?”

  “I think that sounds … nice.”

  I’d spent every Easter of my life with my family, and here I was meeting Antoine on the steps of La Madeleine. We were late. It was difficult to come by a taxi on Easter morning and we had no choice but to take the métro—Cato’s first time since I’d met him. He covered his mouth for most of the ride, tapping his foot and watching anxiously as the subway line chart counted each stop before we arrived.

  “Haven’t I always told you punctuality is a virtue?” Antoine said to his son.

  He turned to me and shook my hand as if we were meeting for the first time.

  “Please.” He motioned to an usher waiting behind him, indicating that we should follow him down the aisle below the vaulted ceiling and painted domes to our reserved seats a few rows from the altar.

  Afterward, we rode home with Antoine in his chauffeured car. His butler received us, and Antoine led us toward the sitting room with the framed military portraits where I’d waited on my first day visiting Cato. The butler offered us drinks but I only took water. He offered us hors d’oeuvres, too, but I was so nervous I declined. It’s not that I was anxious to have Antoine’s approval. It was more that I feared my relationship with Cato could fall prey to a game of loyalties.

  At Séraphine’s urging, I’d borrowed a pale gray spring suit from Tarentina. They’d both been as surprised as I was that he’d returned to me after so much time apart.

  “You need to be impeccably dressed, chérie. This is the gesture. The old man is acknowledging your relationship. Either that or his son put him up to it.”

  I remembered the day Antoine warned me not to return to see Cato, and yet here we were, sitting together in his salon, me on the edge of the mauve sofa and Antoine leaning back into a blue armchair as Cato sat across the coffee table on an ottoman, both of us listening to his father talk about the weather.

  “How lovely when Paris resurrects each April, don’t you agree, Laura?”

  “Leticia,” Cato corrected.

  “Ah yes, Leticia. Forgive me. And what is it you study here in France?”

  Somehow, diplomacy didn’t seem like the right thing to say, and I couldn’t very well mention that I’d long ago stopped attending classes at the language institute.

  Cato sensed my hesitation, stepping in with, “She studied international relations.”

  “Going into the foreign service, are you?”

  “I’m more interested in the social aspects of transnationalism.”

  He didn’t seem to care what my responses were, but about hitting all his points of inquiry.

  “And tell me, Leticia, when is it that you’ll be going back to … to … your country?” He turned to his son, “Where is it she comes from?”

  “The United Stat
es,” I answered for myself. “I’ll be going back in June.” That was, after all, still the date printed on my return ticket.

  “That’s quite soon.” He seemed pleased.

  The butler came in to tell us lunch was ready and we could take our seats in the dining room. Antoine sat at the head of the long table, with Cato to his right and me to his left. A second butler arrived to assist in serving an asparagus soup. When the main course of Lapin Rôti was set before us, I froze.

  “Bon appétit,” Antoine said, and he and Cato cut into theirs while I picked at the accompanying potatoes and spinach until there was nothing left but the meat and I had no choice but to put my fork and knife down.

  The younger butler arrived at my side looking worried.

  “Is there something wrong with your food, miss?”

  “No, it’s fine. I’m just not very hungry.” I hoped that would be enough.

  “You didn’t even try it,” Antoine remarked mid chew, bits of meat on his gums. “It’s exquisite. You must have a taste. I insist.”

  “I’m sorry. I don’t eat rabbit.”

  “Why not?”

  “My family keeps them as pets.”

  I noticed Cato trying to hide a smile from across the table, but his father was not at all amused.

  “Exactly how many rabbits do you have?”

  “About thirty, the last time I counted.”

  “You keep thirty rabbits inside your home?” Antoine appeared revolted by the notion, staring at his son as if he’d brought some sort of lunatic to the table.

  “They live in an enclosed atrium.”

  “And you allow them to keep reproducing, as if in the wild?”

  “Most of them are neutered”—I had to ask Cato to translate the word neutered. “There might be a few more now. They’re my brother’s.”

  “We can ask the chef to prepare something else for you to eat instead,” Cato said.

  It was strange to hear the formal tone he acquired in his father’s presence.

  “No, thank you. I’m full already. The soup was delicious.”

  Over dessert of a custard tart, Antoine asked me who had recommended me to live in Séraphine’s place. I told him how one of my teachers, a relative of Théophile’s, had put us in touch and after I wrote a letter of introduction and filled out the forms, I’d been interviewed over the phone.