I can’t remember what his kisses felt like because I was numb, or my lips were, maybe from all the alcohol. I only remember that I wondered, with his body over me, trying to push my thighs apart with his knees while I resisted and kept them sealed, if I could make him my surrogate for the body I really longed for that night. I wanted to touch him, but my arms were heavy, so I lay limp, trying to respond with my lips, hoping that kissing him would keep the room from spinning, but after a few minutes I couldn’t
take it anymore, pushed him off me, and ran down the hall to the bathroom to vomit.
When I came back to my room, Romain was on the floor, using his shirt as a pillow. I stepped over him to get back into my bed and was just beginning to fall asleep when I heard him whisper, either to me or to himself, “We always want the ones who don’t want us.”
I met Pascal one night when Tarentina took me to a private party at the Musician’s place. Pascal was a stringy blond and sat next to me on a purple velvet sofa after Tarentina disappeared to one of the bedrooms with the Musician, leaving me in a room full of strangers. It was the first time I’d seen the Musician in person, and it was hard to separate the man from the stories I’d been told about him. How he’d been inviting Tarentina to join him on tour since she was seventeen and showered her with vacations and gifts. The songs he’d written, including one about a Brazilian orphan girl that went on to become one of the biggest hits of his career. Yet she claimed he was a sad man, and alone in his room he looked much older than his fifty-five years with a sunken chest and rodent-like curve to his back that he concealed with gypsy blouses, leather jackets, and long robes. She swore their relationship didn’t involve much sex, maybe because of his age or because he got enough of it elsewhere, but something kept him hooked on Tarentina. She said everyone else hassled him too much, always asking for money or favors, not just the industry people but his family back in his Belgravia mansion, and when it was just the two of them, he was happy to let Tarentina be the star.
One of the Musician’s regular guests, Tarentina had pointed out, was Dominique’s father, a bloated, graying goateed man with his hands on the hips of a young miniskirted model, and that was the reason she never brought the other girls along with her to these parties no matter how much they begged for an invitation.
Pascal only went by his first name and was a singer-songwriter and protégé of the Musician, discovered while performing for change in the Charing Cross tube station in London. Pascal inched his way over from his end of the sofa and offered me a cigarette—Chesterfields—trying the line on me that I looked like one of Gauguin’s Tahitian girls, which I ignored, and instead pulled out my own pack of smokes, but Pascal was undeterred.
He said I had the face of a stranger, and he was a stranger, too. Though he could easily pass for continental French he was actually a Caribbean boy, the son of a fifth-generation Martiniquaise, raised in Margot until sent at sixteen to finish school in Limoges.
“And what are
you
doing in Paris?” he asked me.
He was a good-looking, well-styled vagabond, in torn jeans and silver rings on too many knuckles.
“I’m in school,” I lied, because it was easier than explaining that I’d dropped out and my only work was running a term-paper mill, though it paid for the new dress and high-heel leather boots I was wearing that night, as well as the lace bra and panties Tarentina convinced me to buy at Sabbia Rosa because she said my clothes were so dull she couldn’t stand to wonder what I wore underneath.
“I’m at the Sorbonne.” And that was only a relative fib because some afternoons I crashed lectures there since they didn’t take attendance or check IDs. It was part of my recent plan of self-education. I knew my months in Paris were coming to a close, so
I’d assigned myself a list of cultural excursions, from the Chapelle Expiatoire to the Cimetière des Chiens, Rouen, and the Loire. But nights were still a lonely matter, so I accepted almost any invitation that came to me, falling into Giada’s crowd of party people, following her favorite DJs from club to club or on a blind double date with a pair of Oliviers who took us to that fondue place in Montmartre where they serve wine in baby bottles.
Sometimes the couples took me into their care. Saira and Stef invited me to dinner and to the movies with them, and Naomi dragged me along to Rachid’s boxing matches in Aubervilliers and Clichy-sous-Bois. But nights out with Tarentina were always the biggest production, with her two hours of primping that included music, stretches, and the practicing of smiles, pouts, and scowls in the mirror because, she said, the easiest way to seduce a man is make him a little afraid of you.
“With the right glance, you can make a man doubt every choice he’s made in his life and make him yours for as long as you want him.”
And maybe she was right because the more I behaved indifferently to Pascal, the more he seemed to care about impressing me.
Tarentina stayed with the Musician that night and Pascal offered to drive me home.
“I’ve been here before, years ago,” he said when he pulled his Citroën up to our green doors. “I came to a few parties here. It’s called the Dollhouse or something, no?”
“The House of Stars.”
“Right, right.”
I didn’t look at him until I was out of the car, thanking him for the ride. I felt foolish. I didn’t know how to handle these sorts of moments.
Tarentina agreed that I needed guidance. She arranged for us to run into each other a few more times, at nightclubs and bars, when I realized I’d been paired off with him, and she with the Musician. Pascal was full of plans, telling me in detail about the album he was recording with the Musician as producer, performing in local showcases, planning a tour in Japan that fall after a two-month retreat to his favorite ashram in Rajasthan. He was a “Nowhere Man,” as the girls called such rootless wanderers. He’d spent years traveling in South America with his guitar on his back, and even passed through my namesake, Leticia. Tarentina believed he was the antidote to Cato, bound to his little cottage by the sea. I made an effort to like Pascal, who, for some reason, treated me as if I fascinated him. But as we sat around a tiny table at Castel’s one night, I complained to Tarentina that I felt entirely absent, a mere prop of a girl.
“That’s part of the process, darling,” she told me. “You have to train yourself to be with another man. Everyone does it. You’ll get used to it.”
I invited Pascal to Florian’s gallery reception for the unveiling of Maribel’s painting, as yet
Untitled
. Every year he picked one student to show their work alongside his, and this time she received the honor, though it wasn’t free of rumors about their affair and favoritism because of her parents’ fame. When we all arrived for the reception, she led us around the gallery, past Florian’s paintings to the far wall where her piece hung under a row of track lights, an amalgam of dark tones stippled with paler tinges, shapeless forms woven together that didn’t follow any logic I could identify. Maribel said logic was the enemy of creation and
a painting should never be literal, because our minds and souls are not literal.
“So I guess you won’t explain it to us then?” Camila asked on behalf of our cluster, but Maribel scoffed that an artist should never be asked to explain. To explain is to justify and to justify means one fears judgment, and doubt alone will destroy any chance a work has of being authentic.
The others moved on to look at Florian’s paintings, and Pascal and I stopped by the bar. We took our wineglasses to a corner of the gallery, and he brushed a runaway strand of hair from my face, the intimacy of his gesture startling me, which I think he noticed because he pulled back and slipped his hand in his pocket.
We formed a little wall, speaking of the others, observing them together. Across the gallery Florian held court over a crowd of art folk, while photographers flashed away. He and Maribel avoided each other, while Eliza fluttered about the room; an ever-tan song of a woman who I heard left two children behind in Tarragona years ago to be with Florian in France. That made me curious about her. I wondered to what degree a woman had to love a man in order to leave her children and country for him. Maybe it was like Séraphine once said: The reason the end of love, the severing of intimacy, what in Spanish we call desamor, is so painful is that romantic love is but a cult of one.
That and that each of us gambles our life on what we believe to be the truth.
I thought of the night I was introduced to Florian, how I’d stood on the edge of his boat looking across the water at the lights on the other side of Paris.
And Cato, by the torch, out of the shadows and into the streetlights on the long walk home.
I tried to stop my thoughts, but in the gallery, no matter which way I turned for diversion, from the faces of the people, to the ambiguous artwork, and to Pascal next to me, waiting for some kind of signal that I was ready for him to kiss me, all thoughts led me back to Cato.
Pascal took my hand.
“Are you all right?”
“I need some air.” It wasn’t a dizzying sensation that came over me but a sudden clarity that I was in the wrong place.
We went out to the sidewalk. He lit a cigarette and leaned against the building while I stopped on the curb, looking to the darkened storefronts across the street. I saw a familiar body walk by in clinging black attire. I was sure it was Sharif, the midnight ninja out for a night tagging the city, and called his name but he didn’t hear me.
“You know him?” Pascal was surprised but I was already crossing the street, following the guy down the opposite sidewalk, calling after him until he finally turned around and barked, “What do you want?” into my face.
“I’m sorry,” I said and backed up right into Pascal. “I thought you were someone else.”
“Lita.” Pascal put an arm around me and led me back to the gallery. “Why don’t we get out of here? We can go to my place, or yours if you want.”
His arm was still around me as we sat in the back of the taxi, yet everything about the night felt wrong, and it was only when we arrived at the House of Stars and faced each other on the sidewalk, when he told the taxi driver to keep the meter running, before giving me a single kiss on the cheek and telling
me with a blend of kindness and restraint to “take care,” that I knew Pascal felt it, too.
And then I saw it. The form of a man’s body sitting in the shadows of the stone steps. Loic and Gaspard were still at the gallery. It was someone else.
I stopped walking, halfway across the entrance court.
He leaned into the stream of moonlight.
Cato.
I’d stopped hoping for a moment like this, and now that it was here, I tried to muster indifference, so he wouldn’t see that despite two months of silence, I only wanted to run to him.
“Don’t tell me you’re lost.”
“No. I’m waiting for someone.”
“The others are all at Maribel’s show in the Marais.”
I stopped just short of the stairs where he sat.
“I didn’t come here for any of them.”
“Who did you come here for then?”
“I came to see you.”
“Well, here I am.” I started up the steps toward the door but he caught my hand.
“Lita, sit with me a minute. Please.”
I took a deep breath, as if that would give me fuel, and sat a palm’s width from him, wanting to close my eyes and forget he left that day—rip myself away from this moment, where we sat as new strangers.
“What is it you need to say?” It was easier to keep my eyes to the ground.
“I’ve been wanting to tell you … I tried to pretend we never met.”
Me too
, I wanted to say, but only because he’d given me no other choice.
“I thought it would be easier if I left you to be free to have fun with your friends, enjoy the rest of your time in Paris without being stuck with me.”
“I never felt stuck with you.”
“I’ve been alone so long. It’s the only way I know how to be,” he spoke to the wind in a near whisper, steady and slow as if he’d practiced what he’d say.
“I know you came to see me when I was sick. And then one day you were gone.”
“Your father told me not to come back.”
“I know.”
“And it was Christmas. I went to see my family. I came to see you as soon as I returned. Don’t you remember?”
“Yes, yes. But that’s what I’m trying to tell you. Everything that matters to you is in another country. No matter what, this is going to end with one of us leaving the other.”
“You mean me.”
“It has to be you. I’ll always be here.”
“You talk like you’re sentenced to the life you have.”
“I don’t have the freedom you have. My body isn’t strong enough to jump around the world like you can.”
“What if I stayed?”
Cato met my eyes, just as surprised as I was by my words.
“If you stayed, it would be … different.”
We were quiet until the space shrank between us and I felt his side against mine, his arm reaching around me.
“Cato, what did you come here for?”
“I came for you.” His breath warmed my cheek when he spoke.
“Are you sure that’s what you want?”
“
You
are what I want. I’ll take however many days we have left together, if you’ll take me.”
And like that, it was undone, and we were restored, or so I believed.
Cato departed again a week later, this time with me at his side on the morning train back to the house by the sea. We opened the windows and cleaned together, making it ours again. I went with him to look in on some of the boats he took care of, bobbing like tops in the harbor. I liked watching him. There on the boat deck he was strong. He pulled heavy levers and hooks, hauled piles, and pushed loads with no indication he’d ever been weakened by sickness. Here, he was a magician, the wind roping through his hair, handling a piece of engineering, and with a flick of his hand the sail went up, swift like a handkerchief.
One afternoon Cato prepared the vegetables left at the door by the lady from down the road, and I took the bicycle to the marina to get the fish for dinner from a friendlier fisherman I’d discovered farther down the docks—a Brit from Dover who’d made the crossing for a woman in Honfleur he’d met and married through an ad. I pedaled down the muddy trail easily, as if I’d done so all my life.
This life with him, the marriage of the landscape with our new routines, seemed paradisiacal to me. It didn’t even bother me that in his village people still stared at me when Cato and I walked around together holding hands as if I’d taken one of their own hostage.
That day, I thought I could get used to Cato’s small town.
I believed I could live there. If only he would ask me.
And then he did.
We lay on the floor of the room in his house with the books, though this time, the fireplace was cool and empty. There was no music, only the first sounds of spring, birds outside the window.