Paris Was the Place

by Susan Conley

  “To leave the center, Willow. There are things people can do to make people disappear.”

  What is she talking about? This isn’t a movie. Luke and Gaird are working on one right now about a French girl in Paris on the run. Gita speaks with force. “Manju can do what he likes with me, but I can’t start my own life. If they force me to go back to Manju or if they make me go back to his brother in India, I will walk into a busy street where there are other Indian people dressed like me and I will disappear.”

  Why did I think it was smart to bring her here? Who do I think I am? She sleeps in a cell-like room. The café at the Rodin is like another planet. We stand and make our way through the tables and chairs to the front door, flooded in sunlight. Then we retrace our steps. First the walk across Invalides. Then the wait for the metro.

  I try to talk about where she’ll live in France if she’s set free after the hearing—how she’ll get a job painting people’s portraits. I ask her if she likes to chat with the boy named Kirkit—the new cook in the center’s kitchen. I’ve heard the girls joking with her about Kirkit before class.

  On the train platform she says he’s a nice boy. Indian. From Kerala, and that he asks her questions about Rajasthan. “I want to be in love like in Bollywood movies I have never seen. I want a boy to take me away from here.” She’s never talked so openly to me. We’re co-conspirators.

  “You will know great love in your life, Gita.”

  “But when, Willow? My maa can’t help me. Don’t you see why I can’t go back to India? It will be like I am dead!”

  The train comes and we get off at St. Denis. The late-afternoon light makes Paris feel like one of the only cities in the world to live in. The peeling wrought-iron stoops on Strasbourg look good in the light; so does a fruit stand on the corner of Rue de Metz, run by a woman wearing the red bindi on her forehead. “We should get fruit. What do you want? Pineapple? Mango?” I’ll do anything to change the subject with her. I can’t give her what she really wants.

  “No thank you, Willow. I am not hungry.” She scowls at the ground. And I don’t blame her. How can I please her?

  It’s five after four when we arrive at the center. Truffaut buzzes us in, and Sophie meets us in the hall. “You are back in one piece. How were these sculptures, Gita?”

  “They are pleasing me very much. It is a real museum, Sophie. With paintings also, and there is cake for dessert.” She turns to me. “Good-bye, Willow. Thank you for our day. Thank you for what you are showing me.”

  I wave her down the hall and go inside Sophie’s office and sit on the stool by the door. Sophie follows me, singing in French. “I have to get her out of here more, Sophie. Each week she needs to see the sun and trees and grass in the parks. She’s impatient. She’s getting a little desperate.”

  “God willing, they all need to get out. The only way short of an act of our Creator is to find her a job that OFPRA would approve of. They will only let the girls work if they are not getting paid.”

  “She’s good at speaking English. She isn’t shy, though she can act shy.” I look at the photos above Sophie’s desk—hundreds of Polaroids of girls, taken before their hearings. Some of them are smiling boldly. Most look wary or confused.

  “Gita can come to my school, Sophie. What if I can convince them to let Gita answer phones at the academy?”

  “In English?”

  “I think they will do this for me—let the phones be answered one day a week in English. Let me ask and see.”

  “You do come up with ideas. If you call it temporary, unpaid work, then the powers that be might allow it. There will be forms to fill out. There will be paperwork.”

  “It wouldn’t be France if there wasn’t paperwork.” I stand and smile and walk toward the front door.

  12

  Bikini: a piece of clothing in two parts for swimming or lying in the sun and that does not cover much of the body. First known use: 1947

  Macon and I meet at a bar in the sixth that night on a one-block street called Rue Christine, between St. Germain and the Pont Neuf. It’s a dark, warm cave with walls paneled in red velvet. An African woman sits on a stool under a light and sings jazz in a low, gravelly voice. It’s been four days since he and I walked on the river. No open tables, so we stand in the back and drink small tumblers of whiskey. The songs are slow and sexy and soothing. I want to stay in the bar for as long as we can. Maybe forever. There have been times before when I thought I was falling in love and I didn’t understand what I was supposed to do next. I think now that this wasn’t really love.

  Macon holds my hand. And this feels so entirely right that I don’t need anything else from him. When the woman finishes her last set, we clap and some of the people whistle through their fingers. Then we walk out to the street, still holding hands. We don’t let go. He stops on the corner of Rue Dauphine and brushes the bangs out of my eyes. I’m sure he’s going to kiss me. Because until he kisses me, I won’t know. The kissing tells so much.

  He looks up at the blanket of stars. “Did you realize there are beaches in the south of France where the stars come out in a great spectacle. The sky is dark and the stars are illuminated.” He turns and we walk until a cab slows for us. Or for me. Because he doesn’t come with me. He doesn’t even kiss me. He just touches my hair again and says good-bye and this is part of the tease. The cab drives off, leaving him in the road. I can wait to kiss him. To sleep with him. When I do, I want it to be for a very long time.

  ON TUESDAY NIGHT we have dinner in a small African café in an alley off Rue de Bretagne called Chez Omar. There’s a warm April wind tonight, and the door is propped open. The food comes in small wooden bowls. “Drive with me,” Macon says and takes a bite of couscous.

  “Drive where?” I put my wineglass down on the red tablecloth. Is he asking me to go away with him?

  “Drive with me!” He grabs my right hand in both of his and leans forward in his chair so he looks like he’s about to stand and make an announcement. “To a town called La Napoule on the southern coast. There’s a beach I want us to sleep on. Matisse and Kandinsky paintings not far away in a medieval village called St. Paul de Vence.” Pieces of his hair fall around his face. Then he lets go of my hand and tears off a hunk of bread and dips it in the roasted tomatoes. He doesn’t take his eyes off my eyes. “So will you come with?”

  “What’s that you said? ‘Come with’? I’ve never heard that before. You speak Canadian.” I’m stalling. Not because I don’t want to lie on the sand with him. I could leave tonight for the town called La Napoule. I stall because of my brother.

  “I speak a common dialect called English. I believe it’s been named the world’s international language.” He leans back in his chair.

  “It’s those rounded vowels with some sort of Slavic mixed in.” Red votives burn on the six tables in the small dining room. “I forget this accent you have. I have work in Paris. You have work here.”

  “It is a weekend. That’s all it is. I’m asking you to go away for the weekend. We could leave on Friday. Please. Do I have to beg?”

  “I teach at the academy on Friday. It’s a course on international poetry at nine in the morning.” Yes! is what I want to yell to him. Yes. “My brother’s in Paris. He was sick and he’s better now, but I shouldn’t leave him.”

  “You can tell me about him next Friday, while you’re driving with me to the beach.”

  This time he comes in the cab with me back to my apartment. We sit on the cement stairs on my stoop. The night is warm and the humidity feels like a damp blouse. He pulls me onto his lap sideways, so my knees hang over his left thigh. There’s no one on Rue de la Clef except the cats, who skulk and freeze in the car headlights. “You will love the south of France. You won’t be sorry you came.”

  “I’m never sorry for any of the time I spend with you.”

  “Did you know you are lovely in the light from the streetlamp?” Then he brushes my cheek with his lips. I’m looking down at the sidewa
lk. He brushes his mouth against my mouth. I feel the warmth between my legs and the blood in my face and neck. It’s not really kissing, not exactly.

  “You should come with me to the beach.” He kisses me on my neck and on my mouth again. “I should go home now.”

  “Go where?”

  “Home. Home to the suburbs. A town called Chantilly.”

  I have no idea where that is. We stand, and I put my hands around his waist and hold him for a minute. Then I let go and he jumps the last two steps to the sidewalk and walks away in the dark, hands in his jeans pockets.

  My apartment is a little warren of books, and the air is cooler in here. I climb in bed and call Luke. It’s ten o’clock at night. Then I hang up. When it rings again, he picks up. “Gita’s lawyer at the asylum center asked me to go away with him.”

  “Dearheart, Gaird and I are going to watch Catherine Deneuve.”

  “On a date. He’s asked me to go away.”

  “I’m sorry.” He isn’t listening. “I don’t know who Gita’s lawyer is, and where has he asked you to go, to another courthouse? A different asylum center?”

  “He wants to drive to the south of France and sleep on the beach with me.”

  “Well!” Luke lets out a little shriek. “Well, if only you’d said so in the first place! Finally! We can finally move your love life beyond hippie college boys and leg hair.”

  “You were there, too, lighting incense.”

  “Yes, but you? You almost dropped out of school, for God’s sake. Let’s stick to the facts here. Shave your legs! Wear a bra.”

  “It was 1978.”

  “Uh-huh.” He stops to cough. The fit is one of the longer ones.

  “I don’t need to wear a bra. I’ve never needed a bra.”

  “What I need to know is, does this Macon understand the music of Earth, Wind and Fire?”

  “Not sure.”

  “You need to tell me every minuscule thing. Start at the top of his head and work your way down.”

  I lean back against the headboard. “I thought you had a movie.”

  “This is what we’ve been waiting for! You have a sex life!”

  “I have the idea of a sex life.”

  “Tell me everything.”

  “He has a dimple on his right cheek when he smiles. He only drinks red wine. He speaks English well. He likes to go on at least four dates before making love.”

  “Which means you haven’t yet?”

  “Haven’t gone on the dates?”

  “Made love. What if he’s really good in bed? I mean stupendously good.”

  “What a great thing for me, then.”

  “What if he’s bad? You’re camping on this beach? What if you wake up the next morning and want to run and can’t find a taxi? What if there aren’t any taxis?”

  “This is so unhelpful. Thank you for this.”

  “I try.”

  “I think I’m going to get in a car with him on Friday morning and drive. I think I feel more connected to him than I have with any other man before.”

  “Do you own a bathing suit?”

  “Oh, God. I don’t think so.”

  “We’ll meet after your school tomorrow and find you one. You can’t go to the south of France with a lover and no bikini.”

  “God, I hate that word. It’s ridiculous—‘lover.’ ”

  “You’re going to be sleeping together on the beach. Call it what you want.”

  “I’m going now. I’ll meet you tomorrow. I’m scared of where you’re going to take me.”

  “I know a few shops.”

  “I’m hanging up. I don’t have money for Norma Kamali bikinis.”

  “There’s a foundation I’ve heard of that has funds for celibate American poetry teachers in France in need of bikinis.”

  “Hanging up now. I love you. Good-bye.”

  13

  Pip: one of the spots on dice, playing cards, or dominoes; each of the small segments into which the surface of a pineapple is divided; slang for sickness

  Macon pulls up to the curb outside my building on Friday in a small blue pickup truck, not a car. I walk into the street and lean my face through the driver’s window. He smells of pears and white soap. “Good morning.” Then I say it again. “Good morning.” It’s almost like tasting him to breathe him in like this. Nine o’clock in the morning and warmer than it’s been all year. The poplars look like they’re wearing green headdresses—full and leafy.

  I pat the hood of the truck like it’s a dog. “You got a nice, petit, bébé truck.” It’s a Renault with a square cab and round hubcaps, and some kind of plaid synthetic fabric over the bench seat.

  “You like it?” He taps the dashboard with his fingers and grins that grin. “I borrowed it from a law student interning at the office. We’re starting small. We wouldn’t want a truck we couldn’t handle.”

  I make myself walk slowly to the passenger side—walk, don’t run—and hoist my tote bag up onto the floor. I’m nervous. “I’ve found a new word.” I’m driving away from the city with Gita’s lawyer, and no one at the center knows about it. I haven’t left Paris since I got here in September. “I called the school last night.” I try to slow myself down. “I told them I was coming down with the pip.”

  “You didn’t.” He raises his eyebrows. They’re the same shade of brown as his eyelashes. Everything about him looks big for the small truck—his legs, his hands.

  “I learned it from Polly. My British friend in the drama department. The pip is vague enough to cover lots of symptoms.” I glance up once at my apartment. The iron balcony looks like cake decoration from down here, with thick florettes and black metal leaves.

  “I know the pip.” He clicks the left blinker and puts the truck in first gear. We head south to Rue Daubenton over a series of cobblestone blocks lined with leaking gutters and sagging electrical lines. I imagine my apartment then. I like that apartment. The balcony looked good enough to eat. Where are we going? And who is he? This man? A diesel bus grinds its gears and releases a blast of smoke and we’re thrown back into the late twentieth century. Then we’re on a wider avenue that runs along the front of the Jardin des Plantes. I think it’s called St. Hilaire, or maybe that’s just the last part; some of the street names here are so incredibly long. I try to stay hopeful. We’re driving to the beach. Paris-the-movie unfolds while he drives us through the narrow streets. The city looks different to me already. It’s the effect of being inside the truck with him. I belong here more now. In France. Simply because somebody wants to drive with me. It’s small but it’s also everything.

  The gardens even look different. The plants are a study in the most beautiful greens, with high and low manicured shrubbery and small banks of hedges and rosebushes. Is it the idea of love that does this? Gives the city this backlighting and connects me to it? If I let myself believe I can love Macon, then everything else in my life seems possible. Completely surmountable. I decide then that the greatest thing in the world is to long for someone and then to get to sit next to them in a small French truck driving south toward Lyon.

  “We had the pip in Toronto.” Macon laughs this time. “American girls get colds. They get stuffy noses. Or the flu. Not the pip. Your school will know you made it up.” I stare at him while he drives and wonder if I’ll love him. Truly love him.

  “No. No, they won’t. Today marks the beginning of my life with the pip. What I want to know is if symptoms include the need to drive all day in a small truck down the center of France?”

  “They often do.” His fingers are tapered, with nails that could use attention.

  “And camp on a beach with a man you don’t know?”

  “Very common.”

  We pass through the fifth on Avenue des Gobelins. The rattan chairs are filled with Parisians smoking cigarettes and reading Le Monde or Le Figaro and drinking coffee. The thirteenth sits directly under the fifth, and the buildings here are taller and modern. We crawl around a traffic circle at the Place d
’Italie, where a small orchard of magnolia trees blooms pink in the middle. Farther into the thirteenth we pass a check-cashing center and a string of Asian restaurants and food stalls. Have we changed continents? Luke will sometimes come down here to Chinatown between Avenue d’Italie and Avenue de Choisy to shop. There’s a spice in Sichuan cooking that he loves called ma, which makes my tongue go numb, and he can only get it here. Luke feels far away now, even though we’re still in the city. So do my father and Sara. Everything’s been reordered. I’m calling it the truck of requited longing in my head. It’s Macon and me and my mother driving to the beach. She’s still with me. Smiling. Watching. She’s often with me. She doesn’t obstruct, now that she’s dead. She just helps me.

  “Did you bring anything?” Macon nods toward the tape deck. The blue street sign at Porte d’Italie reads A6/​LYON/​BORDEAUX/​NANTES/​AÉROPORT D’ORLY. “I remembered sleeping bags and wine. But I forgot music.” He hunches forward until he’s hugging the steering wheel with both arms. I have the urge to give away all my secrets to him. Right now. All of them. And to see if he receives them or turns away. This is the part of myself I’m trying to calibrate. He smiles. “How can there be a road trip through France without music?”

  We pass the exit for Orly Airport and the parking garages off the highway. I peel a tangerine to calm down. “I have music.” The rind piles in my lap. I paw through my bag again. The suburbs give way to small fields. There are goats in fenced-in plots and stone farmhouses so close to the city. “I have music if you like Rickie Lee Jones.”

  I put the tape in. The song’s “Chuck E.’s in Love.” When Sara and I weren’t nurturing our Bob Dylan obsession, we were deep into Rickie Lee Jones. This meant we grew our hair long and wore hats and long silk scarves.

  “What is this song?”

  “This song”—I roll my window up halfway—“is so good that I spent whole days playing it in my bedroom in college. The singer is in a pool hall. The boy she loves goes after another girl.”