“What are they?”
“To see the world. To do something meaningful.”
“Promise you’ll do those things. With me or without me.”
“I promise. But you have to promise the same.”
“I already know I can’t do everything I wish I could do.”
“You can do anything you want.” Those were words I’d been raised on, but when I said them to Cato, I knew he didn’t believe me.
We were quiet together for a long time before we fell asleep. That night I dreamed of his house by the sea, and in the morning when we woke I told him that as soon as my family was gone, I wanted to go back there with him.
Tarentina said Santi couldn’t leave without experiencing a proper night out in Paris. She enlisted most of the girls, and even Loic and Rachid, but Cato stayed back at the house. I was convinced we were having fun. My brother was the center of attention, just as he was accustomed to being, but once he was hopped up on vodka, he went right for the probe, grabbing my elbow, shouting in my ear under the thundering nightclub bass that I was wasting my time with Cato.
I’d spent the day with my family. The snow had cleared, sun had broken through, and it was unusually warm. We’d walked through the Luxembourg Gardens, visited the catacombs and the miracle church, where my mother dragged Beto down to his knees at the altar. I said a few prayers of my own, mostly of
gratitude. My brothers hadn’t said another word about Cato and I’d forgiven them, even decided their possessive behavior had been kind of cute.
But it was just like Santi to wait until all was forgiven to ambush me.
Tarentina was on his other arm trying to pull him from the table to the dance floor, but he shook her off gently and stayed firm at my side.
“What are you going to do? Pack him up and bring him home with you? You two have nothing in common besides your puppy eyes for each other. That’s not enough to get you to the fucking corner.”
I tried to ignore him but Santi rotated me by the shoulders to face him.
“You’re forgetting who you are, Lita. Let me remind you our parents took their first ride on an airplane as guests of a pair of dogs.”
“You don’t need to remind me of that.”
“Oh, I do. I see that you think you’re like your fancy friends now. This is
their
world. You, hermanita, are just passing through. And everyone knows it but you.”
“This,” he motioned to the club, the crowd around us, “this is not your life. This country is not your maldito country. That decaying blueblood tenement you’re living in is not your home.
We
are your home.”
With my family departed, we’d planned to go to Calvados for the weekend. Our bags were packed. Rather, one bag was packed with both our things. I took pride in that detail as I stood over the bed, folding his clothes with mine, accommodating our things the way we’d made room for each other in our lives and learned to fit together. He spoke from behind me, said my name in a tone I’d never heard from him, even and unfeeling, full of stillness as if he were alone in the room and practicing a line, not speaking it to me.
“Lita. I think I should go home alone.”
I waited a moment before turning around to face him.
“What did you say?”
“I think I should be alone at my house for a while. And I think you should stay here.”
There was a new remoteness in his gaze.
“I think … I think it’s the best thing for us.”
I responded by pulling my clothes from his, placing them on the bed beside the bag. There was less to unpack than I thought.
When I was through, he touched my arm. “Maybe you can come next weekend.”
“It sounds like you don’t want me there.”
“It’s not that I don’t want you there …” There was burden in his voice.
I sat down beside my little pile.
“I thought you were happy all this time.”
“I was. I am.”
“Don’t say we’ll see each other again if that’s not what you want.”
“It’s not that I don’t want to see you, Lita.”
“Then what is it?”
“I just think it will be easier if we stop things now.”
“Easier than what?” I hated the scorn in my voice.
Cato shuffled his feet against the rug and let out a long sigh.
“We don’t talk about it, but you know you’re going to leave in a few months. And you know I can’t go with you. We’re just prolonging things.”
“I wasn’t as sure about my leaving as you seem to be.”
“I just want to do the logical thing.”
“Why is that?”
“Don’t make me say it.”
“You’re going to have to because I don’t know what you mean.”
“Lita, we don’t make sense. Anybody can see that about us.” But the voice I heard was not his. It could have belonged to my brother, his father, Séraphine, or any of the girls in the house, but I knew it did not originate with him.
“Walk away then,” I said coolly, with too much pride to show I was crumbling. “Leave right now if that’s what makes sense to you.”
To my surprise, he did.
Of course I cried. Until my eyes swelled and my face ached. In English the word for crying feels trite, empty. The Spanish llorando
is so much better. To say it feels like a cry, the way you have to open up your mouth and throat, concluding on the tip of the tongue, the back of the teeth. The French pleurer sounds too pretty, restrained, a costume of sadness.
I wanted to invent a new word for crying without tears. That broken feeling. The disillusion.
On the third day, I finally opened the door to Tarentina. She pulled me out of my bed and into her arms, wiped my face clean, brushed my hair, and told me, in her Tarentina way of talking about love like a clinician, that men are capable of astonishing tenderness without feeling a single ounce of love, and those who do feel love usually don’t have the faintest idea how to express it.
“I saw this coming, Lita, but I didn’t want to spoil your fun. Had you asked for my advice I would have told you to withhold your affections a bit. Not be so available, serving yourself up like an apple-mouthed roasted pig. Men can take only so much beauty before they run. They’re not women, you know.”
“So it’s my fault? I’m the one who failed?”
“No, of course not. He’s right. You two don’t make sense. But look at the bright side. You got what you came to Paris for, no?”
Tarentina’s theory was that parents sent their daughters to Europe not to be educated but to get the thirst for love affairs out of their system so they can return home exhausted and disheartened enough to slip into the roles outlined for them since birth. She said a daughter is a father’s primary investment, and all of us, except her, because she was fatherless, were a bunch of clipped-wing canaries. Sooner or later each of us would return home to our safe small lives, marry the boy who’d been picked out for us, and relegate memories of our Paris days to a quiet trove of photographs and diaries hidden in the back of a closet.
“None of the relationships in this house would ever translate to real life,” she said. “These love affairs can only exist
here
. At the end of each séjour there are always tears and heavy promises, but there comes a time when every girl does as she’s told, packs up her things, returns home, and leaves that lover behind. You’d have done the same, darling. Trust me. Count yourself lucky that your Cato said good bye before you had to. You’ll have less regret that way.”
I started to tell her I wasn’t like other girls and Cato wasn’t like other boys, but she held up her palm and told me in a voice that was both soft and severe, “I know you think you’re special. You’ve probably been told you were special all your life. But there’s a Lita in the House of Stars every year.”
Séraphine sent for me. I curled into the violet armchair next to her bed and helped myself to one of her Dunhills. I waited for her to bait me for a confession but she only watched me, nodding her head with her slight, twitchy pulses. I looked around at the photographs lining the walls, a way for her to see her whole life in a tapestry every day. I used to think I wanted to be that way when I was old, surrounded by objects and artifacts from a life lived passionately and well, but now it seemed tragic: Séraphine, painted and immobile in her white bed mound, while the world danced on outside her doors. Somehow, I resented her at that moment.
“You must be thrilled your prediction came true,” I said.
“Prediction?”
“You said he would leave me and you were right.”
“Cynicism is an addictive pill, chérie. It doesn’t suit you.” She took a cigarette for herself, the lighter flame wobbling in her shaky hands. “Some people are gifted with love and don’t know what to
do with it. They’re simply born to be alone. Love will always slip through their fingers like water.”
“Am I one of those people?”
I stood up and walked to the window; spikes of winter air vibrated against the glass. Across the garden, the stone bench where I’d sat with Cato the night of the first party was covered with broken twigs and bird shit.
“No,” Séraphine said, “you never will be. You love fully. I saw this much in you. But it’s not love if you depend on a man to hold you up like a pillar. A woman must have roots in the earth, not wait for her lover to plant her in a beautiful clay pot. Yours was an honest mistake, chérie. If you had found a potent love earlier in life like some girls do at the age of thirteen or fourteen, you would be a very different woman.”
“I was in love once.”
“Were you?”
“I thought I was.”
“Well, then you should know young love is not meant to last. It’s just a glimmer that sets fire to a heart that will be repeatedly baptized with sorrows and abandonments until you arrive at the
right
love, which might not even be a love but more like a partnership, two people who fall into each other’s lives in a way that is comfortable and inevitable.”
“That doesn’t sound very romantic.”
“It’s not mean to be, chérie. In the end we all become closer to who we started out as in life than who we set out to be. The best thing one can do is accept the life that was claimed for you the second you were born. Dreaming is for children. And one day, after everything, you will wake up and realize you really haven’t suffered much at all.”
I began walking the city trying to undo every step I’d taken with him at my side. I squinted against beastly white winter winds blowing off the Seine, walked along the quai all the way across to Place des Victoires, where I sat on the same curb to adjust the same leather boots I wore on our first outing.
I passed through the passages of the Palais Royal, stopping at the precise spot where he fell ill, remembering the shadows of his body on the pavement.
There were no brides and grooms posing for wedding photos beside the obelisk that day. No candied white gowns, tuxedos, or rose bouquets shedding petals in the street.
On the Pont Alexandre, a Russian family asked me to take their picture. The parents hugged the children as they stood along the wall in front of one of the lanterns. When they left, I went to the statue where we’d stood together the day the rain came down. I found our names on the bronze covered by more recent signatures. A piece of us remained.
I crossed Les Invalides up the boulevard to the Rodin Museum, passed through the galleries feeling more like a phantom than a person, out to the back garden, then moved slowly along the pebble paths watching lovers on the stone benches nuzzling each other, the sky darkening above. Before my tour was over I stopped in Chateaubriand’s park to find it vacant, free of children and the usual elderly ladies hunched over needlepoint, the solitary old men smoking cigarettes and staring up at the clouds as if they held some secret. I sat on my bench, where I came that first day to write postcards to my brother, staring across the path to where he’d once sat and watched me. I could see him, sitting, one leg crossed over another. His slanted shoulders, sheepish smile. The mussed hair, pearly skin. I heard his voice. Heard him say my name.
Paris is a city of sidewalk love scenes any day of the year but on one February day, lovers become especially brazen, warmed over by some nuclear love bomb. You can’t walk two meters without witnessing a meeting of tongues, bodies wrapped so far into each other that it’s unclear where one ends and the other begins. In doorways, a guy standing before a girl with a bouquet in hand, anticipation all over his lips.
Tarentina and I were the only dateless Valentine refugees in the house. In her case it was by choice because she rejected displays of sentimentality. I wanted to stay home locked in the cavern of my bedroom, replaying every conversation I’d had with Cato to myself, searching the pauses, hesitations, and ellipses for clues that he’d had a foot out the door, but she forced me out with her that night.
She called Romain and asked him to hold us a table at Far Niente even though I hadn’t opened the door for him when he came by a few days earlier to read
Martin Eden
, because I suspected he’d greet me with some sort of lecture. The House of Stars rumors were never restricted to only our walls, and the Far Niente waiters all knew Cato had split on me. Romain positioned my chair so my back was to the room full of couples, but when the violinist the boss had hired for the night began to play the opening bars of “Speak Softly Love,” Tarentina ordered Romain to get the vino flowing.
Around midnight I went to the ladies’ room and took a long look at myself in the mirror. I usually avoided mirrors. My mother would scold me for looking at my reflection too long as if she didn’t want me to know myself too well. But this mirror in the tiny red bathroom of Far Niente seduced me into its shiny metal frame. I stared at myself, noticing new lines around my
eyes and lips, my pasty complexion, my eyes droopier than I’d ever realized and, tonight, puffed like profiteroles with pink and purple fatigue marks pressed into the corners. I wondered if this was the same face Cato saw when he lay across from me in bed, when he kissed me.
I didn’t know my face anymore and was unsure that I’d ever known it. During those months I thought it was enough to see myself through his eyes. I thought he saw someone special, beautiful, worthy of love. En route to the restaurant I’d felt the pavement belonged to him, stretches of rue du Bac he’d already claimed with me or on his way to me. The inky sky above was his, and now I felt an imposter in his country, each hour borrowed against hope that he’d reappear.
Someone knocked on the bathroom door. I said I’d be out in a minute, and when I opened it there was Romain looking ravenous, blocking me so that I couldn’t step out past him but he could step in. There the kisses began. I don’t remember the first one, just the succession that followed, the sloppy mouths finding each other, my disorientation as I forgot where I was, opening my eyes to an inch of myself reflected in the mirror, my face obscured by his curls, my body shrinking within his. It may have been seconds or minutes—I couldn’t determine—before I stopped him as he started to unbutton my blouse. He didn’t resist, seeming pleased to have gotten this far. We faced each other. His palms rested on my hips while I folded my arms against my chest.
Back at the table I drank more wine. Tarentina didn’t let on that she noticed my flushed face or swollen lips. She was talking about Loic, how he’d fallen for a Jamaican ballerina named Corinne who’d come by the house asking if there were any open rooms for rent. She’d just been kicked out of the apartment she shared with
her boyfriend on rue de Passy and heard about the House of Stars from a friend of a friend. Loic took her number and helped her find a chambre de bonne on rue Vaugirard through one of his contacts and, miserly as he was, had reserved a table at La Tour d’Argent to take her for a Valentine’s dinner.
It was late. I told Tarentina I wanted to go home. We were the last people in the restaurant. Even the toothless homeless man had already come for his meal and gone. Romain had changed out of his apron and black shirt into his regular clothes. When he saw us get up to leave I could tell he was just waiting for the invitation. I looked at him and he looked at me and Tarentina pretended to look away. We walked out the door and he followed. Tarentina kept a few steps ahead and Romain walked beside me, his fingers gliding against mine, trying to find a place within them, but I kept pulling them away. Maybe it was the cocktail of wine and woe, the stench of romance rising from the concrete. I should have told him to leave that night but couldn’t. I didn’t want to be alone.
When we were in my bedroom and Tarentina had closed the door to hers, I told him he could stay the night if he wanted. He could even sleep in my bed, but we would
only
sleep. As I said the words I believed them, and by the way he stared at me, nodding, I thought he believed me, too.