Hidden in Paris

by Corine Gantz

  Jared took her in his arms so she’d let go, and she went soft. “I’ll be back,” he lied.

  “I’ll wait right here,” she breathed.

  At last, Jared opened the glass door and the frigid air rescued him. He screwed his hat on and walked away in long strides, drinking up the icy night air. The street was lively at this late hour, still early by Parisian standards. The smell of the restaurants he passed reminded him he was starving. Greek, Vietnamese, Italian, he didn’t need to look up to know their ethnicity. He stopped at a Greek hole-in-the-wall and ordered a lamb sandwich. The man cut slivers of meat from a hanging roast of lamb and let them fall onto the baguette. He paid and ate the steaming sandwich as he walked briskly. He walked for half an hour until he reached rue de Cambronne, deserted from traffic and free of store lights at this time of night. He noticed the pounding of his own heart, watched the little clouds coming out of his mouth with every breath. He stopped in front of the building where he lived; its eighteenth-century Parisian architecture, both classic and ornate. Jared inserted the old-fashioned key in the keyhole and pushed open the wide wooden door. The familiar scent of the building’s staircase, hundreds of years of wax and patina combined with soup, home-cooked meals, the scent of centuries, welcomed him. Five flights of stairs, and he was home.

  He let himself into his apartment and turned on the light of a bare light bulb. As he walked into the room, he stripped off most of his clothes—his coat, his hat, his scarf, followed by his sweater and T-shirt—and let them drop to the floor. Jared ignored the scarce furniture and the books, boxes, and trash scattered around the room. He took off socks and shoes and threw them wherever they would land.

  He stood in front of a table thick with grunge, food residue, and paint stains, and stared at the tubes of paint on the table. After a while, he opened a few, dropped dollops of oil paint into a plastic plate, and blinked at the canvas, the largest he could afford, one meter by one and a half meters, but still, it was too small. He opened the turpentine bottle and rummaged through a shoebox for a decent brush. There must have been well over fifty unusable brushes in the box. All coated with dried paint. Ruined. Jared painted until five in the morning. When he could hardly stand, he cleaned off his hands with turpentine and a dirty cloth. He then searched the floor for his coat, wrapped it around his body, and let himself fall on the couch. He sat and stared at his work until it became blurry, and then he fell asleep sitting up. The brushes sat in paint in the plastic plate.

  The room smelled of detergent and vomit from last night’s misery. Althea was cold to her core despite the sweaters and blankets. She was stiff on her bed, reading the same words over and over. She licked her chapped lips for the fiftieth time. Her lips were getting worse, but she had stopped using lip balm because of its fat content. She had been so bad last night.

  She read the small ad again, six little black lines of text, and shook her head to chase it away. She’d read that ad a dozen times already, trying to dismiss it, yet her gaze kept drifting back to it, until she was forced to stop long enough to feel “it.” The silly words in that small ad were like a promise of something. Reading the paper became increasingly difficult. Any reading required racking effort, but this morning, she was cold, and there was a picture of a lagoon somewhere in the Pacific Ocean on the first page of the travel section. The title of the article, “Alone in the Sun. Go and Discover Your Inner Fish,” floated in lagoon waters. In the heart of a seemingly endless winter, photographs of the heavenly island seemed nonsensical. Warmth and beauty and a shallow translucent sea accessible to no one. For Althea, realizing that going there would have been anybody’s dream was a blow, because she was incapable of such a dream. The picture had no impact on her, the words had no meaning. Go? She had no strength. Discover? She had no curiosity. Alone? She cared for no one. In the sun? She had no interest whatsoever. Tropical Paradise held no promise of well-being to her.

  But again, her weary eyes drifted away from the lagoon pictures and towards the small print ad buried amongst many.

  Start over in Paris! Lovely rooms in a beautiful private home. Nurturing environment. Children welcome. Affordable. Meals included. Best area of Paris. English spoken. Call *****

  Althea couldn’t peel her eyes from the bold letters. “Start over in Paris.” What did it mean? Whatever it meant, it spoke to a desire she didn’t know she had, and lately, the faintest desire was like an oasis. Every word in that ad was a little caress that stirred up an incomprehensible longing.

  She had studied French for many years. Also Spanish, German, Latin, and Italian. Althea had a peculiar gift for languages. That and drawing, her two useless talents. She’d had some indistinct plans of going to France, years ago, but as usual, more realistic and sensible plans had been carried through. Althea wasn’t going anywhere. Her mom needed her. As far back as Althea could remember, her mom had repeated, “Had it not been for Althea, I would have killed myself long ago.” Althea tossed the newspaper into the trash. But now something was happening, in spite of herself. Something extraordinary. The small, soft wing of a desire fluttered in her heart.

  She authorized herself breakfast. Two liters of very black tea, unsweetened. Two apples cut in quarters. She would eat, slowly, methodically, over an hour while watching the Food Channel. She’d go back to the trash long after breakfast and forage for the cores and eat them, and this would leave her overwhelmed with shame and panic. But when the cooking show ended, instead of cleaning up after breakfast, she observed her fingers dial for the operator to find out what time it was in Paris. She went to the trashcan, and instead of the apple core, she retrieved the travel section of the paper. She dialed the number and sat on the corner of her table, with the receiver nudged between her ear and her shoulder while her arms were crossed over her chest in an attempt to protect herself from unknown enemies. There were a dozen rings, and the space between the rings became eternities. Althea was going to hang up and suddenly a woman’s voice, so close.

  “Allo?”

  “Hello? Do...do you speak...English?” Althea asked.

  “I sure do. Don’t mind the heavy breathing. I was all the way upstairs and had to run down to get the phone. Tripped over the damn rug! Who’s this?”

  “I’m sorry you had to run...fall,” Althea stammered.

  “Nah, I like to live dangerously. What’s your name?”

  “Althea Hoyt.” Althea waited for a second. “I’m sorry.”

  “Are you kidding? Anything to bail out of my kid’s homework! What do you want to know, Althea?”

  Althea. That was her name. Why did it sound different in this woman’s mouth?

  “Well,” Althea asked, improvising, “is this a bed-andbreakfast? How much do you charge? Do you still have a room? Is month-to-month okay? Is it furnished? I am...I’m thinking of taking a...sort of...sabbatical.”

  Chapter 6

  Wrapped in her red poncho and sitting on the cold grass of the soccer field, Annie watched her boys and Lucas run with the ball. She was gathering pebbles in her hands. Amazing the quantities of stones that were heart-shaped when you started looking. Maxence was getting stronger she noticed. He could keep up with Lucas’s pace. The four of them playing soccer in the park was a bittersweet sight. Johnny had been too busy to do these kinds of things with the boys. He had meant to, but later. Everything was always for later. Johnny was a big talker, a man of promises, often broken ones. But the promises he made were made with gusto; with such details and enthusiasm that you could almost trick yourself into thinking they might actually come true. Future adventure-filled voyages in mysterious locations, future gourmet picnics by the moonlight, or future epic soccer games. She should have forced him to not miss out on the kids. But who was she to talk; she who at the moment sat on the ground collecting pebbles, lost in the past, entirely incapable of getting up and playing with her children?

  Lucas, in his Adidas shorts and knee-high socks, his skinny legs surprisingly hairy, was cleverly mastering the t
riple task of convincing each kid that they were beating him. Lucas threw his hands up in surrender. “I need a break. Jouez sans moi,” he said, and he jogged towards her and sat down, his breathing no heavier than after a stroll. The kids ran towards them, high socks and knees covered in mud, breathing like freight trains.

  “You’re just afraid we’ll beat the crap out of you!” Maxence said.

  “The poop out of you,” Annie suggested.

  “Let me catch my breath. Je suis crevé,” Lucas said. Maxence turned around, kicked the ball hard and ran. Paul and Laurent sprinted after him.

  “Her name is Lola and she lives in Bel Air!” Annie said.

  “Quest-ce que c’est?”

  “Hello? Fresh Prince of Bel-Air?”

  Lucas shook his head. “A prince?”

  “Will Smith? Men in Black?” Lucas’s expression was genuinely clueless so she gave up. “It’s in or near Beverly Hills.”

  Lucas made a sound of recognition. “Ahh!”

  “She sounds so nice. Very normal. Just a mom with children, you know, like me. I kind of fell in love with the idea of that, you know, a lost mom with a daughter and a toddler boy, and me helping her out.”

  “And the father?”

  Annie considered the pebbles in her hands and had a vision of herself chucking them at Lucas. “Out of the picture. An abusive monster. Horrible.”

  “Did you fall in love with that, too?”

  “That what?”

  “The notion of an abusive husband?”

  Now her eyes were resting on much larger stones. “What is that supposed to mean? Of course not! I gave her some advice.”

  “Such as?”

  “I told her she needed to follow her instinct and put some mileage between them.”

  “Is all this her instinct or yours?”

  Annie sprang to her feet like a jack-in-the-box. “I don’t like where this conversation is going, so I’m ending it. I’ll be at home.”

  Annie walked away fuming, her poncho bouncing with each step. She left the field and didn’t turn around. What a French asshole! She trotted towards the house, crossed boulevard Suchet and made the turn after Musée Marmottan, and grumbled all the way to La Muette. They’d be better off on the soccer field without her anyway

  The reality was that the other calls she had received for her ad were no good. And she did not receive that many responses at all. There had been the retired couple from San Francisco who wanted to stay for a year because they had read A Year in Provence, and it had messed with their heads. Rental agencies had called who wanted her money, and she had dismissed the lone men sent to work in France for a few months. There had also been a wealthy couple looking for a true French experience that included a fax, cable, high speed internet, and a TV in the room. They’d asked if there was a hot tub. She had snapped that this was Paris, France, not Paris, Vegas. But really, she was horrified at the thought of people coming in and complaining about her place. Her house was low tech, and she wanted it to stay that way. A computer would be nice one day, maybe. The teachers sure were putting pressure on her, not to mention the boys’ obsession with it. But she certainly refused to get cable. TV was bad enough as it was; who needed more of it?

  So when Lola finally called and did not ask her about complicated things such as DSL, HBO, DVD, and VCR, Annie had to have her. “I’m not sure what I’m looking for,” Lola had said. She was blowing her nose occasionally and Annie did not know if she was crying or had a cold. “I’m not even sure I should come to France. It would be for a short time, very temporary.” But in the next sentence, Lola said, “I might need a school for my daughter. Are there international schools nearby?” Lola said she loved France but did not really speak the language, calling her French an embarrassment.

  “Well, in that case, don’t even try your French here. You’ll get lynched!” Annie said. When Lola gave a throaty laugh, something genuine and childish, it reassured Annie immensely.

  Lola had also sounded confused and undecided, so when the issue of the bathroom was raised, way too soon in the conversation, Annie was sure it would be a deal breaker. “Do the rooms have their own bathrooms?”

  “Well, it’s not exactly like that. This is an old house, and it kind of lacks... amenities.” Annie had braced herself. ”There are eight bedrooms, but only two bathrooms. As a matter of fact, you might have to share a bathroom with other tenants.”

  “Share?”

  “Well, take turns, of course. Anyway, don’t you think hygiene is way overrated in the U.S.?” she had joked.

  “Well, that’s true,” Lola had responded, like this made perfect sense.

  Annie was on a roll with lame-ass jokes “Worse comes to worst, the kitchen sink is huge.”

  Lola had laughed again. “Bathing is in the kitchen? Oh, I feel better now!”

  Only this was not entirely a joke. During the summer months, the boys used the kitchen sink as a pool of sorts. They climbed in and out, into the garden, back to the kitchen, leaving puddles of water and mud everywhere. The same tub was at times the place for earth experiments. Once, she found a tadpole in it. No need to get into that.

  “It is a crazy thing,” Lola said. “You wrote ‘start over,’ and I couldn’t get the ad out of my mind. This is totally intuitive. I’m mostly, like, an intuitive person.”

  Oh great, she thought. A new agey L.A. wackjob. She breathed in, and then spewed out her response: “Don’t over think it, dear. Grab your kids and pack your bags. Don’t take too much. Your clothes will seem irrelevant the instant you see what people wear here. I’ve got toys, towels, métro tickets, and I’m a mean cook. The best bathroom has a wonderfully large tub, and I am the proud owner of a bubble bath collection.” She had said that fast and in a high-pitched tone, like a damn insurance salesman. She cringed and waited. Lola gave a big sigh. “This sounds so, like, nurturing. And Paris is so beautiful in the winter.” Annie did not think Paris was so damn beautiful in the winter. “Oh, like, totally,” she said.

  “I can’t get any sort of fresh start in L.A. My husband would talk me out of it,” Lola said, blowing her nose again. This time, Annie was sure she was crying. “He can be very persuasive. I can’t say no to him.”

  Annie had to ask. “How does he feel about your separation?”

  “Well,” Lola seemed to consider how to respond, “it’s really been years in the making. Mark has resigned himself to the idea. I’m sure.”

  “And he’s fine with you going to another country?”

  “Well, this would be temporary, of course.”

  “Of course,” Annie said. “When a woman decides to leave, it is always the right thing to do,” she said, forgetting that she knew nothing on the subject. She decided to appeal to Lola’s intuitive side. “We have instinct, and something tells me you’ve been fighting yours for a while.” And by then, she had managed to convince herself that what she was truly being helpful.

  “I’m making roast beef for lunch. It was on sale so I said, ‘Why not!’” Pamela chirped.

  Althea contemplated the idea. Red meat. Meat on sale. Rotting meat. “Great!” she said flatly as she took off her coat. On the counter, the meat was thawing. She wondered how long it had been sitting there. Many times as a girl she had sat for what seemed to be hours in front of her cold plate unable to lift the fork to her mouth, until her mom, in furious exasperation, slapped her across the face and sent her to finish her meal in the bathroom. It was the ultimate punishment as well as the only way out for everyone. There, Althea would cry in despair and relief and tip the plate of food down the toilet after staying in the bathroom for a respectable amount of time to avoid suspicion. Then she would wait there in dry sobs until Pamela came to free her and give her the profuse love that always came after the storm. In the end, her mother had the last word since Althea had eaten all of her food. The last word, but not the victory.

  During lunch, sometime between the roast beef, the rice pudding, and Althea going to the bathroom
to vomit, Pamela revealed to her husband the barely formulated concept that Althea had immediately regretted sharing.

  “She should take a cruise instead. At least she won’t get any of those diseases they have overseas.”

  “Cruises are for old farts like us,” tried her dad.

  Pamela rolled her eyes to the ceiling. “Your father has no idea what I’m talking about. You spend two or three days in one city, say, Vienna and...”

  “Vienna’s not in France; it’s in Germany,” Henry said.

  “Anyway, Germany might be better. Cleaner. The French think they’re better than us, after everything we’ve done for them.”

  “Actually, Dad,” Althea asked, “isn’t Vienna in Austria?”

  Her father looked up from his plate. “What, sweetheart?”

  “Vienna’s in Austria.”

  “Forget Vienna, Althea,” her mom cut in angrily. “Your dad has no idea about geography and never has.”

  The day dragged on painfully. Her dad went for a nap and she accompanied her mom on a walk, their weekly walk in a park deserted by humans and pigeons alike. France was not brought up again. Later on, when she was alone in the kitchen folding her laundry on the counter and smelling each item before folding, Althea was surprised to see her dad come in.

  “Your mother is talking to the TV—the TV, for Pete’s sake!” Standing next to her, her father looked frail. These days, his hands always seemed to shake ever so slightly. He was holding a neatly folded piece of paper between his fingers. Watching him, she felt suddenly drained.

  “This idea of going to Paris, I think it’s a good one,” Henry said abruptly. “You need a little fun, a little adventure, you know.”

  “I’m probably not...”

  “You were the best in your French class at school I reckon. That’s a talent, languages.”