Hidden in Paris

by Corine Gantz

  On this first day of May, rue de Passy was overtaken by the sweet smell of Lily of the Valley. Street vendors had basketfuls of the small white flowers at their feet, and since Annie wasn’t carrying any yet, she could not make a step without someone shoving a small bouquet towards her nose.

  The store windows she passed were in full spring regalia. The spring fashion, it seemed, had a nautical theme. It was in the streets as well. “French women never go out without lipstick,” was the circular thought in her mind. She did not look too French at the moment. Her hair was a disaster. No cut, no color. She slowed her pace and stopped to look at the mannequins in a boutique’s window. That T-shirt with navy and white stripes looked fresh and youthful. She had not bought as much as a new T-shirt in three years. She flattened her hair with the palm of her hand and entered the boutique.

  What size was she now? She looked at piles of jeans, mountains of them. Where to start? A young woman in a flowery dress walked out from behind a curtain and looked at Annie disapprovingly from her toes to her head. Annie turned on her heels and made a run for the exit.

  “Je peux vous aider?” the woman said.

  “Non, je regardais, c’est tout. Anyhoo, ciao and sayonara as they say in Bangladesh.”

  “I speak English,” the salesperson said. She had a nice smile, not that ice queen Parisian attitude.

  Annie slowed down.

  “I’d love to help you,” the woman insisted.

  “Help me?” Annie inhaled. “Do you perform lobotomies?”

  The woman considered her. “I can do better than that.”

  Oh the power of a good salesperson. An hour later, Annie was leaving the store with a bag filled with pretty clothes on her arm and the address of a hairdresser in her hand.

  Althea had lit up all the candles in the room and set them around her desk. A Parisian landscape was taking form in black and white under her fingers on a piece of paper she had found around the house and with a sharpie borrowed from the kitchen: a café, passersby holding umbrellas, rain, silhouettes of a woman and a man in dark coats holding hands. It was almost eleven at night and Althea was dressed to go out. She had spent the last hour on her make-up, perfecting the eyeliner above her top lashes. Her coat was laid on her bed, ready to be put on. In a few minutes, she prayed, Jared would knock at her door and again would take her out for the evening. He had brought food for them to eat two hours before, in the strange ritual that was now theirs. Then he had left with a promise to come back.

  Now that Jared fed her, painted her, and by some miracle seemed to want to show her the city at night, her time alone was spent on nothing but waiting for him. She counted hours, and she counted minutes, and she counted breaths inside of those minutes.

  In the short month since Jared had begun painting her, everything had changed for Althea. She could hardly remember what she did with her thoughts before she knew him. She loved every instant of those nights, even if she was cold to the core, and tired, even if Jared never did what she most wanted him to do: kiss her.

  Some nights with Jared, icy gusts of wind beat down on them without mercy. Other nights the air felt soft and smelled of lilac. His long black coat like the sail of a night ship, Jared ignored the elements altogether. Her hand in his, she floated, her feet barely skimming over the asphalt. Paris and Jared became confusingly entwined in her understanding, each inconceivable without the other.

  It was on those nightly walks through the blur of light that was Paris that she was slowly discovering her voice. Jared never pressured her to speak. He could be silent for an hour and then speak for another hour, fervent monologues in French about politics, art, and religion. She spoke very little at first, she preferred to listen to him, watch his beard creep on his face as the night went on, and inhale his scent. Then she dared answer his questions, first a few words in French, then stringing words together like beads, then composing sentences more musical to her ear than music. Speaking in French, in Paris, was like a blank slate. Her voice was different in French; her thoughts were different in French. She never wanted to speak English, her mother tongue, again. But she loved being with Jared in silence too; she felt great freedom in simply being present.

  Jared advanced through the streets of Paris rather than wander through them. He did not explain where they were going or why, and she did not ask. When they were not walking, they sat in deserted subway cars that meandered under the city and screeched through long stops at every station. There they sat shoulder to shoulder, hand in hand, often not speaking a word. Yet, even doing nothing in silence, she felt more intensely awake in Jared’s company than she ever felt in her life.

  Once they reached a destination, a party, a restaurant where people he knew were dining, or the home of a friend, Jared never really seemed to settle or plan to stay. In fact it wasn’t uncommon for them to walk or ride the métro for an entire hour to get somewhere, only to leave that destination minutes later.

  Everyone they met in Paris, in cafés, in train stations, in the streets, seemed to know Jared. In the darkest corners of the city, homeless people, prostitute or junkies would speak to him, seeking his attention for a few moments. The same happened in glamorous areas of Paris where the beautiful people of an intelligentsia Jared seemed welcomed to join tried to seduce him into staying longer. All looked at her questioningly, some bold enough to ask who she was. Only then would Jared tell her name, but he never volunteered other information, and never introduced her. He had been one, and now he was two, and no explanation was given.

  After several nights of this, Althea arrived at the conclusion that Jared liked places more than people. He pointed out the architecture, and the history behind the architecture. There was a narrative to each place he took her to, she could tell, but often she would have to guess that narrative herself.

  One night, on the quays of the Seine at dusk, couples were soon replaced by a furtive crowd. He asked her to wait in a dark corner under a bridge while a conversation took place between him and a man. The exchange chilled her, though she heard not a word. It lasted only a few seconds, an eternity of separation between her body and his. Later, she told him she had been scared and he only smiled and squeezed her hand tighter.

  Once they had walked fast on rue Botzaris when Jared came to a stop. There was a torn patch in a chain link fence, and he helped her crawl under. The moon was bright that night and she recognized the park of the Buttes-Chaumont where he had taken her the evening before, just before closing. It was a different park in the crepuscule. Gone were the voices and children, gone the dogs and the grass. Instead, shadows layered like Japanese inks, trees, grass, rocks, and ponds all turned shades of gray.

  Walking on a graveled path, Althea thought she heard moaning. She squeezed Jared’s hand hard. Past a patch of tall bushes, two men, barely hidden, were having sex. They were close enough that the reflection of the moon shone briefly in one of the men’s eyes. Jared didn’t hurry or slow his pace any more than if he had passed a mother and carriage in broad daylight.

  “That was horrible,” Althea whispered.

  “Why? Because of the sex or the fact that they were both men?”

  She loathed herself, but said, “The idea of sex outside of love.” Realizing she had brought up sex, she backtracked. “Paris is sad.”

  “It depends on the mood you are in to begin with,” Jared responded. He removed his hand and she died a little, but he slowed his pace and put his arm around her shoulders.

  One time, after wandering through Paris all night long, seemingly looking for someone, they ended up in Rungis. “This is the largest wholesale food market in the world,” he told her “Whatever you want to buy, someone will sell it to you here.”

  It felt like the middle of the night but the market teemed with frantic activity. Althea gasped at the scale of what lay before her eyes: entire animals hung on hooks, live geese in cages, piles of dead rabbits, croaking frogs, snails, fish by the bushel, head and tails attached. Odors. She should n
ot have been surprised. In France, she had discovered, everything, the most disgusting things, were intended to be eaten. The ground was littered with bruised vegetables, feathers, crushed ice, straw, cigarette butts. She was overtaken with nausea between wheels of cheese piled like tires and black mushrooms that smelled of rot.

  “The French are obsessed with food.”

  “Whatever little happiness you can steal in a day seems like a good idea to me,” Jared had said.

  There was never an instant when she was not terrified that Jared could turn towards her and realize his mistake. There was no reason he wanted to spend time with her at all, at least no reason he cared to give her. Just the same, at every street corner, every pause in this frenetic search for nothing, Althea dreamed, hoped, begged new and ancient gods that Jared would kiss her. But though he incomprehensibly held her hand tight and sat close to her in the métro, this he never did. Her nights with Jared were spent in a state of awakened dreaming and ended when he eventually took her back to Annie’s house, opened the door for her, walked up the stairs with her, deposited her back in her room, in her world, and then left. The first time he took her out, she thought it had been a fluke. The next evening though, he had come back. Every night after that she had wondered if it was the last time, but every time he had come back.

  In her bedroom, Althea was done with the drawing. She tossed it in the trash. There was no more paper. She looked at the clock. Ten at night. Jared would soon be there she hoped, to rescue her for her main preoccupation, defined in her mind as “Not Calling Mom.” The obsession took over most of her waking hours and resulted in crippled sleep and circular thinking. She was in turns heartbroken and furious with her mother, emotions that soon morphed into self-loathing and confusion as she waited for sundown. It was in that state of anguish and suspended animation that she counted the minutes until Jared reappeared into her life.

  Annie had not mentioned anything about her new clothes, the cute striped T-shirt, the new sandals, the pedicure, nor had she talked about her desire to cook leaner food to Lola who, she felt, was a bit too self-involved to notice details about other people. Annie tossed her cookbooks one by one onto the kitchen table. How was it possible none of them contained a single recipe that wasn’t laced with butter, cream, starches and carbohydrates? No more buying cookbooks on an empty stomach.

  She heard the distinct sound of her front door opening followed by mild cursing en Français announcing that Lucas had let himself in and that she had therefore forgotten to lock the front door again. How predictable the man, how predictable the woman, how predictable the situation. Never mind food, a battle of a different nature was afoot. She braced herself, pretended to be absorbed in her cookbook.

  Lucas entered the kitchen in a huff. “Your front door was open.”

  “Hello to you, too,” she cooed.

  “You didn’t lock. Again!”

  “And?”

  When Lucas was mad, his accent was even cuter. “Eets not safe to leave your front door open.”

  She didn’t look up from her cookbook. “Eet’s my house so I do what ees good for me!”

  Lucas paced around the kitchen. “Is this new?” he said.

  “What’s new?”

  “Your clothes?”

  She shook her head, feeling terribly embarrassed, like she had been caught in the act of being vain. “Nah,” she answered. Lucas was getting a tad hunchbacked with age, but to be objective, he was still a pretty handsome guy. That’s how nature was so unfair. The Sean Connery Syndrome is what she called it. Ameliorate versus deteriorate, the unjust advantage man gets over woman as age ripens one and withers the other.

  “You could be wrong about leaving your door open,” he said. “You just could be wrong! And what happens then?”

  “There’s nothing of value in this house except for your god-awful TV.”

  “My TV?” Lucas choked on the injustice. He stirred the air with wide arm gestures. “I don’t care about robberies. I care about some maniac,” which he pronounced maniackeh, “coming to...I don’t know...”

  “A rapist?” Annie pondered. “Now of course the upside is that I’d finally get laid.”

  “Don’t say things like this!” Lucas said, horrified.

  She looked up from her cookbook at last and flashed him an utterly innocent look. “Now what did I say?”

  Lucas stopped pacing and crossed his arms. “Are you telling me the reason you leave your door open is that you want sex?”

  She shrugged. “No one’s exactly banging on my door to...bang me, so why not?” The conversation was turning to a direction that had very little to do with the unlocked door.

  Lucas uncrossed his arms, tapped the side of his cheek as though he was deep in thought. “Are you saying that all that stands between danger and a locked door is sex?”

  Annie challenged him, raised her chin with apparent relief. “Are you finally offering your services here? At last! I thought you would never offer.”

  In the kitchen, a spring breeze gently moved the muslin curtains, and Annie heard the chirping birds that were taking over her blossoming garden. What in the world was she saying?

  Lucas’s eyes smiled with the kind of blazing gaze that only Frenchmen can muster without commanding an immediate slap across the face. “It would be my pleasure,” he said.

  It was the way he said it. With that voice and the smirk, she found herself cooking from her head to her toes. A deeper shade of crimson than anything Althea could have produced. Annie sprang to her feet and advanced towards the sink to hide her face and that stupid blush. “Yeah, right, anytime!” she muttered.

  Lucas walked backward out of the kitchen. “I... have to go. I’ll lock the door behind me, d’accord?”

  “D’accord, whatever,” she yelled back.

  She sat back down, and read the same line in the cookbook twenty times, smiling to herself like a nincompoop.

  Chapter 20

  Althea instinctively began to shadow Jared’s rhythm, like a mother resigned to getting sleep only when her baby does. She first fought the self-discipline that had always dictated she rise and go to bed early, but after a few days of staying up all night with him, she surrendered to going to sleep at sun up and not rising until the early afternoon. When they came back from their night in the city, Jared accompanied her to her room then went to his. If he fell asleep easily or not, her own sleep was uneasy, her ears vigilant for the familiar stirring in the next room, the moment when he would wake up sometime after two in the afternoon. Through difficult dreams where she was at war with the world, she heard him take showers in the bathroom, dress, walk down the stairs, and leave the house. After he was gone, she was left to wait for him. She passed the time by taking interminable baths, experimenting with Lola’s makeup, working the eyeliner with increased expertise, drawing on everything she could put her hands on. She waited impatiently for the times when she could find herself alone in the house. Then she felt free to move about and inspect the bedrooms, the closets, inside the refrigerator, the content of trashcans, cupboards, laundry baskets. She thought of what she would change, what she would clean, what she would keep and what she would throw away if this were to be hers and Jared’s house. In Lola’s room, there weren’t any more letters in the trash, but in Annie’s trashcan she was surprised to find strange new things. Today a pair of men’s shoes, the next day a man’s hat, photographs, even a watch one day. This bothered her. She had preferred Annie’s compulsion to keep her dead husband’s belongings. She herself had a small stash of things that Jared had left behind in her room: a T-shirt, an old métro pass with his photograph, an empty lighter which she hid under her bed in the darkest corner next to the wall.

  She liked being in the kitchen alone the most, boiling water, making and sipping tea and feeling the twists and turns of hunger traveling through her body. While the water boiled in the teapot, she passed her fingers over shelves sticky with honey, oil and crumbs. In the back of the shelves were sm
all bottles, walnut oil, truffle oil, and tiny jars of mustard, maple syrup, broken pepper grinders, Asian spices, Tagine mix, flour in paper bags. She climbed on chairs to peer through deeper discarded layers of hardened packets of brown sugar, expired cans of beans and corn, two hundred Euros in a tin can, and little glass bottles she opened one by one and smelled. They had pretty names: vanille, essence d’amande, eau de rose, eau de violette. Some were full, some so old the contents had evaporated and all that was left were thick smelly substances at the bottom. She was fascinated with every corner of the house, the smell of mildew and food, the dust, the mess, the discarded objects, the abundance of useless things, the dough rising on the counter top, the fabric littered around the sewing machine, the seedlings growing under windows, everything in progress, nothing ever completed. She felt the burning desire to put things away, to discard, to clean, to make it perfect, to finish things for Annie. But this was not her house. She was not allowed.

  Jared did not need a house, she thought. He might need a place to sleep and bathe, but the rest of the time, he was in motion. What was Jared doing between the time he woke up in the afternoon and sundown when he came back to the house to eat with her, an occupation she now thought of as ‘feeding time’? She wished she could ask him that question, but such was not the nature of their relationship. But what was the nature of their relationship?