Paris Was the Place

by Susan Conley

  “Truly, do you really think I give a damn about what you ate? Can you please stop?”

  “The best part might have been the drive. We stopped at a gas station, and this enormous flock of birds flew over our heads.”

  “I’m dying and you ditched me for a French lawyer you’ve just met.”

  “You’re not dying. They were starlings, it turns out. Detouring from Rome.” I sit down on one end of the couch and take a bite of his croissant. “I love it when it’s chewy like this.” I lean over and put my hand on his forehead. “You feel fine, right?”

  Is he keeping things from me? He better not be. I can’t get inside his mind. Our mother died of heart disease that her doctor said would never kill her. Did she hide her symptoms, too? Did she know she was worse off than we thought?

  “I feel almost back to normal, thank you.”

  “Almost.” This means not really. He’s not gaining any weight.

  “Almost means very close to the way I was before my lung collapsed. You left me.”

  “I drove to the coast for three days.”

  “How does he kiss?”

  “If you mean Macon, then I’m not answering. I know this is hard for you, but there are things that remain private.” I look around. “Where is Gaird, anyway?”

  “He went to London Saturday morning to scout out a special crane we need here for the set. He’ll be home tonight.”

  “You’ve been alone for two days? Damnit. I’ll speak to Gaird.”

  “Please don’t.” Luke laughs. “Gaird is still a little jealous of you.” I laugh and take a sip of water and snort a little of it out my nose. “Besides, he’s never available. God, I’m full. Gross. I ate too much. Why did you let me eat the whole thing?” He looks at his watch. “I want to hear more about the Canadian lover. What did Macon wear to the beach?” He closes his eyes. “Tell me all the details!”

  “Clothes. He wore clothes.”

  “When can I meet him?”

  “He asked the same thing about you.” The nature of our telepathy is that sometimes Luke and I have to say very little. This is why he’s like home to me. If I’m going to love Macon, then Luke has to at least like him.

  “He asked about my clothes?”

  “No. He wants to meet you.”

  “You are moving très fast.”

  “You worked with Gaird in China for three months before you moved to Paris with him. Three months.” I stand and walk toward the kitchen. “What are you cooking for dinner?”

  “I’m just having breakfast. I need to meet him. Where does he live?”

  “He and his ex-wife share a house in Chantilly.”

  “Jesus, that sounds complicated.”

  “It’s a way for him to see his son more.” I don’t sound convincing. I lean against the kitchen door and close my eyes.

  “His son.”

  “His son, Pablo. Macon and his ex-wife have been divorced two years, but Macon lives in the guest room to help raise the boy.”

  “And I thought Gaird was a reclamation project!”

  “It’s all okay, Luke. But how are you really?”

  “I’m a little tired. That’s all. I have a dinner tonight with people from the French embassy in Beijing who may support a new water system in Shunyi with us.”

  “Right now you rest. You sleep. What time will Gaird be back?”

  “His train comes in at seven. Please go home and do some work. I know you have papers to grade.”

  I stay with him all afternoon and we order Indian food for dinner from a place near the Bois de Boulogne that delivers. We eat at the round table in front of the windows again. Avenue Victor Hugo gets quiet once the shops close, and becomes a Paris still-life—tall elm trees like border guards and the lavish pots of geraniums on the clean stoops. Gaird returns as we’re finishing. He’s full of ideas about how to get this crane—Chinese and operated from the ground without anyone in it—from London to Paris next week. He’s buzzing from the high of travel and so am I still sort of, and the three of us have a glass of wine. I leave them after nine, when we’re all sleepy, and I splurge on a cab to get myself home.

  ON TUESDAY we start in on Gertrude Stein at the academy. She lived in France most of her life, writing stream-of-consciousness experiments she called rhythmical essays. She said they were meant to conjure “the excitingness of pure being.” Critics called her work a literary response to the trove of cubist paintings she collected. Her book Tender Buttons is organized into three simple sections: Objects. Food. Rooms. We start with Objects. A prose poem called “A Box.” I ask the students to try to translate it into French for me:

  Out of kindness comes redness and out of rudeness comes rapid same question, out of an eye comes research, out of selection comes painful cattle. So then the order is that a white way of being round is something suggesting a pin and is it disappointing

  The students have to guess at what she means and talk about their own inner lives in response to her. There’s no logical order or way to get around her language. They have to dig in. Nothing’s pinned down. Language for the sake of language. I can’t stop smiling while the class tries to parse meaning. Then I read another poem out loud in English called “The Daughter”:

  Let me tell you a story. A painter loved a woman. A musician did not sing. A South African loved books. An American was a woman and needed help. Are Americans the same as incubators. But this is the rest of the story. He became an authority.

  This time I ask the students to translate the words into French out loud. There’s physicality to Stein’s taut lines. Something muscular that sends an electrical charge through the class. Some of the students think she’s nuts. Others say she’s a genius. None of them can follow completely. I love their confusion and the way they can’t stop guessing and talking about Stein’s intentions. As if the author’s intention was always everything and that a deeper subconscious muscle wasn’t ever at work. The class wants to find a narrative thread in Stein and hold on to it until everything in the poem and in life is tidy and solved. But Stein doesn’t make it that easy.

  The week goes by. No phone call from Macon. On Friday I finally call him because I’m wilting. Delphine answers. What was I expecting? It’s her house. “Hello,” I say in English like a schoolgirl. “I’m wondering if Macon is there? Macon Ventri?” Wife. Ex-wife. The distinction means nothing to me now.

  She takes a loud breath—the kind of “poof” that Macon makes several times a day. She must also be shrugging her shoulders, so I try to imagine them—perfect sculpted French shoulders in some tiny pastel cashmere cardigan. Then she says in very fast, crisp French, “Macon is not here. Macon is out with his son. And who are you?”

  “Willow.” I can speak in French. Let me show her my French. “Willow Pears from the asylum center on Rue de Metz.” What am I doing? Giving her my résumé? I’m unnerved by how lonely I am without him. It’s only been five days. He’s probably gotten back together with her. I see the end of us—a slow, horrible petering out into a series of awkward, guilt-ridden phone calls.

  “I do not know when he is coming back.” Delphine hangs up.

  I stand at the counter in my dark kitchen because I forgot to turn the light on and the sun set while I was on the phone. I stare down at the black receiver. Delphine has managed to draw blood through the phone line. How has she done this? I can’t move. Sara and I ate a picnic lunch yesterday near the Canal St. Martin—halfway between Rue de Metz and her hospital. She told me she was afraid I was falling in love with Macon.

  “No,” I’d said. “Not after one weekend away together. It’s not possible.”

  But I call her at home now and the phone in their apartment rings and rings. Maybe Sara was right. I pick up a file of poems on the floor next to the couch and carry them to my bed. They’re all poems by Sarojini. I lie under the comforter and try to inhabit precolonial India and to forget Macon and Delphine ever existed. How stupid was I, to get inside the truck.

  He finall
y calls on Saturday afternoon. Talks in a whisper. Says he wants to go to the zoo.

  “Are you out of your mind? You haven’t phoned since we got back to Paris. And why are you whispering? Why does it feel like we’re hiding from someone?”

  “Because we are.” He laughs. “I knew you would be piqued. But my ex-wife doesn’t understand why I want to bring Pablo to meet you. You don’t know how much I’ve missed you. Craved you. I’ve been working on her all week. I didn’t want to call until I had a plan.”

  “A quick hello would have been okay. A little ‘how are you?’ These are pleasantries we use in the country I come from. We don’t let whole weeks go by after we’ve seduced someone on an old sleeping bag in the south of France on a public beach.” I can’t believe I’m laughing. It means I’m going to forgive him.

  He tries to shush me, but I can’t be sure because there’s static. “I want to start with animals.”

  “Start where? What are you talking about?”

  “I want you to meet us at the zoo. Animals are Pablo’s favorite. He’s more tuned in to elephants right now than humans. Can you come with us to the Bois de Vincennes tomorrow?”

  “You’re serious?”

  “Zoos are very serious places for four-year-old boys.”

  THE BOIS DE VINCENNES is a wooded area in the eastern part of Paris. There’s a castle and a botanical garden called Parc Floral and a lake with boats and the zoo, which has taken me longer to find than I thought it would. I see them before they see me: a tall man in faded jeans with a boy in a black karate uniform outside the stucco gates of the Parc Zoologique. Macon grabs Pablo’s shoulders and laughs and says something in his ear, and the boy turns and waves at me.

  It’s the middle of April now, and the green beech trees stand several feet taller than the red gates. Their new leaves rustle in the wind. “Bonjour, Willie,” the boy says. He’s got longish dark hair that hangs in his eyes, and he’s beautiful like his father but more so. His face is smooth and perfectly proportioned in miniature. His eyes are also blue, and he holds on to a small plastic orange giraffe.

  “Pablo,” I answer back in French, “I’m so excited to see the animals with you.” I put my hand out but quickly see it’s not the thing to do with little boys. You don’t shake hands. You kneel down on the ground and meet them at eye level, which is what I do next.

  “I know,” he says in English. He looks at me for a moment and then off somewhere over my left shoulder. Macon must speak English with him at home. Then Pablo dials back in to me. “I know. I know. I’m excited, too! This is a giraffe.” He puts the animal very close in front of my face. “They cannot run as fast as cheetahs. There will be cheetahs here today.”

  “What’s your favorite animal, Pablo?” I’m happy to speak in any language with him.

  “Cheetah or tiger, I’m not sure. Who do you think would win in a race?”

  “I don’t think the tiger can catch the cheetah.”

  “I think you’re right.” He looks up at the trees that creak in the wind. “The trees have arms here.”

  “It looks like that, doesn’t it?”

  We walk to a white ticket booth tattooed with animal prints. Macon guides me through the metal turnstile, his hand on my lower back. We start with peacocks. This is one of those zoos without gates, just rock barriers and open moats that sit between the animal enclosures and the people. There’s a very good gathering of lemurs next to the peacocks. Then we walk to the giraffes and spend some significant time here, while Pablo stares at the real ones and then back at his toy. After the sea lions, we walk counterclockwise along the perimeter, veering to the left around the elephants. The chimpanzees are hidden in a forest, and they’re really hard to see. Some of them jump out and hang off the trees and holler at us over by the moat. I can’t believe we keep any of these animals locked up. They seem way too smart for that.

  “Do you know why I never want people in any of my stories at bed, just animals?” Pablo asks. I can’t tell if I’m supposed to laugh. “I only want animals in the stories because I don’t want anything scary to happen to people I know.”

  “I think you’re smart to do it that way.”

  “Very smart,” Macon repeats as we walk toward the cheetahs.

  “Did you know I learned to blow air up my nose with my mouth?”

  “Oh, Pablo,” Macon says.

  “I can do it! I can do it! Watch me.”

  The cheetah enclosure is bigger than anything the poor peacocks could dream of, with low-limbed scrub and river rocks to bask on in the sun. But even this feels too small. A cheetah needs open plains and rivers and miles to roam. Pablo stands as close as he can to the moat and stares at a cheetah, and the cheetah stares back.

  “The cat’s not moving,” Macon says. “It’s made of stone. It can’t be real.”

  “It freezes,” Pablo says without looking up at his father. “Until it sees prey, and then it pounces.” The big cat leaps to a rock above the moat like it’s trying to attack something up there—a piece of wood or the fake rabbit. It’s so close now we can read its spots.

  “That’s it!” Pablo yells. “That’s how he gets his prey!”

  “He’s beautiful,” I say.

  “Every cheetah has different spots,” Pablo says. “There aren’t any cheetahs with the same pattern.”

  “How far can a cheetah jump, Pablo?” I ask.

  “Very, very far,” he says with certainty.

  Has one ever tried to jump this moat? Because it looks so easy to escape. I turn to Macon and whisper, “I wish they were all in the wild, where they belong.” Macon smiles, and I want just one quick kiss.

  Pablo runs ahead of us around a small hill inhabited by birds. We catch up with him at a sign that reads MOUFLONS, MARKHORS, ET VULTURES. Then we head to the snack bar. “He’s pretty amazing,” I say.

  “Yeah.” Macon smiles. “It’s a weird thing to have people tell me about my child. I wish I could take credit. I wish I could say every bit of him is my DNA. But I’d be lying.”

  “And you never lie.”

  “I don’t.”

  “He is so together.”

  “You mean even though Delphine and I have done our best to screw him up by divorcing and living together, he seems okay?”

  “Exactly.”

  “It’s luck. Or maybe a great deal more of parenting than I ever knew is just about showing love. Delphine doesn’t approve of us, you know. I told her she could go fuck herself and her boyfriend, Gabriel, too.” He smiles.

  “You could have said something nicer.”

  “I’ve tried nice with her. She thinks we are moving too fast. I’ve thought about it. I think fast is okay, if you agree. I am unwilling to lie to make her feel better. There’s too much to be done in a day and not enough time to lie.”

  “Fast is good if you make sure to call the other person every few days. Because last week we were two people who’d made love in La Napoule more times than I could count who were then separated by a very long phone line.” I’m trying to trust him. Trying to stay at the zoo with him and not go far away in my mind.

  We catch up to Pablo at a small crowd of kids watching a mime twist balloons into animal shapes. The man hands Pablo a miniature blue dachshund. He brings it to me. “Daddy told me you woke up in California once and a mountain lion was eating your dog.”

  “Daddy told you this?” I forgot I’d told Macon this story. “It’s true. It was horrible.”

  The story goes that my father brought a cocker spaniel puppy with him when he moved back in with us. Luke and I left the dog outside by accident when we went to town on our bikes. We rode into the yard an hour later, and there was blood and most of the head was gone, but you could make out the puppy’s spine. Mom sat on the steps with her face in her hands and cried. Dad yelled at everyone. Then he cried, too.

  I cried for the puppy, but first I cried for my mother, because I knew how much she’d missed Dad when he was gone and how she’d worked to keep
things together at the house. I thought I knew what the puppy meant for her—some kind of symbol of Dad’s return. I hadn’t separated from her yet. I still believed she and I swam in the same water. I thought I felt all the things that she felt.

  Pablo and Macon and I eat hot dogs at the snack bar and drink warm Coke from paper cups filled with crushed ice. Then we head out of the gates toward the metro station. “What I really want to do,” Pablo says, “is count to infinity.”

  “You’re getting smart on me.” Macon squeezes Pablo’s hand tighter.

  “I’ve been practicing.” He counts out loud while we walk past the lake toward Porte Dorée. It takes him longer than I thought it would to get to one hundred, and he skips ninety-nine. I want to hug him when he finishes, or hug Macon and say, Look at us! We’re talking about infinity on our way out of the zoo—can you believe this? A portal into the world of children. It’s been here all along, but I’ve never had access.

  Pablo reminds me of Luke when he was a little boy—his upturned nose, the smooth skin under his eyes. We stand outside the station and the good-byes come fast. It’s quicker for me to walk home than to take a train. So I’ll head to the river on the Quai de Bercy, past the park there. But I want more time with both of them, more assurance from Macon about what we’re doing. I kneel and say good-bye to Pablo and get a quick hug, which he gives so naturally—arms open wide, as if we’ve always hugged and known each other like this. Then that’s it. That’s all. Pablo jumps into his father’s arms, and they wave at me. Macon turns and walks down the stairs into the metro station, and they’re gone.

  HE CALLS the next morning. “Where can I find you tonight? When can I see you?”

  “This is what I was talking about.” I smile. “This invention known as the telephone. This is progress.”

  He’s outside my building at four o’clock. I run down and let him in. He presses me against the mirror at the back of the elevator and kisses my neck and eyelids. We get inside the apartment before he lifts my T-shirt over my head and unzips my jeans. My clothes are off before we make it to the bedroom, where we stay for hours.