I nodded just to appease her, exhaling long across the room. I was getting good at smoking. Séraphine even commented that I looked like I’d been at it for years already.
“To think, all this time I thought you had something with the Corsican.”
“Romain?”
“I’m told he visits you every day.”
“We just read together. I’m helping him with his English.”
“And this new boy? Where did you meet him?”
“The night of Florian’s party.” I left out that we’d met on the street while his cousin graffitied the Pont de l’Alma.
“He’s French?”
“He seems to be. I don’t know much about him.”
“Just that you like him.”
I nodded.
“This is good, chérie. Autumn is when smart girls do like the squirrels gathering nuts and find a lover to carry them through the winter.”
I chuckled and she waited for me to regain my composure before continuing.
“You laugh, chérie, but you must trust this old woman. Without a winter lover, a girl risks falling into melancholy, and if a girl has too many melancholy winters, she falls out of practice for love and it’s nearly impossible to recover. Remember, you can’t make an omelet without cracking eggs.”
I’d just nod when she started philosophizing. Sometimes people only want to be heard, and it’s a beautiful thing to watch someone switch from casual conversation to revealing a particle of their interior. Séraphine was happiest when you let her dish out free advice or give her a reason to talk abut 1932, her pinnacle year of the whole century, when everything was still grand and glorious and every man wanted a chance to become her husband. At least that’s how she sold her past. She had loads of lovers in the first twenty years of her marriage before she and Théophile gave up and started being faithful to each other. A lineup of men and a few women—it was the fashion—but Philippe and Jean-Michel were the valedictorians of her memoirs. Jean-Michel, the groundskeeper of the Biarritz house, which the family had to sell off in the seventies, and Philippe, her all-time-favorite amant, a Canadian banker she met at Harry’s Bar while his wife was in the powder room. For twelve years Séraphine and Philippe would each
tell their spouses they were going to Mont Blanc for three weeks of spa cure, which was true if you’re one of those people who thinks of sex as medicinal.
“Now that I’m old, I can be honest,” is how she began her special confessions. “Most of the time people do not manage to marry the one they truly love. My greatest regret is that I didn’t have the courage to hold on to my Philippe when everyone and everything in my life told me to let him go.”
She sighed as if the memory exhausted her.
“But in the end, chérie, there was nothing to be done. Women of my generation were raised to betray ourselves in ways your generation will never know.”
Violeta returned with my deconstructed dress. I put on what was left of it and stepped out from behind the screen to show Séraphine, self-conscious with Violeta there because she and the other maids referred to us girls as “the little sluts” when they thought we were out of earshot. Still, they always left a tray of coffee and brioches for two at Tarentina’s door the mornings after she had an overnight guest.
I thanked Violeta for working on my dress and she muttered something indecipherable back, handing me the mound of leftover fabric, all tears and scissor cuts now. I walked over to the full-length mirror in the corner of the room and stared at my bare arms and legs, trying not to think what my mother would say if she could see what I’d allowed to happen to her gift to me, a dress I would never get back.
“It’s too shor—”
Séraphine held up her palm to silence me.
“It’s perfect. One must break the shell to get the almond.”
“I really don’t feel comfortable.”
“Chérie, you must remember that to be beautiful or fearless, you only have to believe it and others will believe it, too.”
“I’ve never wanted to be beautiful.”
“Everyone wants to be beautiful,” she laughed but stopped herself when she realized I hadn’t meant to be funny.
“Chérie, you are only beginning to know who you are. Taste this night in your new dress. You can return to being the girl you think you are tomorrow.”
By ten o’clock, the crowd spilled onto the house’s terrace, through the foyer, drinks held to chests, filling the salon. The other girls were deep into the party while I hung back on the top of the stairs waiting to catch Cato’s arrival at our door. At midnight, I was still perched on the second-floor landing alone. Tarentina came upstairs for a fresh pack of her cigarettes, designer menthols she bought by the carton whenever she traveled.
“What are you doing up here? You look like you’ve been banished.”
She sat down beside me and handed me a cigarette along with her preferred gold lighter, though she had a whole drawer full of them, mostly engraved gifts from men.
I took my time lighting it to avoid responding.
“Lita, I insist you explain your sad face and why you’re sitting up here wrinkling your tiny dress.”
I told her about Cato, how we’d seen each other at the park and tonight at the pharmacy.
“So that’s why you wanted me to invite Sharif! Why didn’t you just say so? I never invite guys I’ve already slept with to our
parties. They start acting like boyfriends and I can’t stand that. But I would have made an exception to get Cato here for you.”
“It doesn’t matter now. I invited him myself.”
“That was your mistake. You shouldn’t have invited him. You should have mentioned the party and
not
invited him. Men like to be tortured.”
She slipped her arm around my back.
“You can’t be so sincere. That sort of energy repels a man. I honestly don’t know who started the rumor that you’re smart. You have so much to learn. Luckily you have me to finish educating you.”
“How is it downstairs?” I was tired of talking about myself.
“Not too bad. Giada corralled most of the messy drunks into the garden. They can piss and puke in the bushes out there and nobody notices. I heard from Camila that Maribel and Florian left together.”
“No,” I said and pointed to Maribel’s closed bedroom door. They’d passed me on their way upstairs earlier.
“Ah, of course.”
“How’s Loic?”
“The usual. He and Dominique are the happy hosts of the party, behaving like a married couple. By morning they won’t be speaking and Dominique will be in a depression until it all happens again the next time. You know those chaste affairs tend to be the most twisted.”
With Tarentina, you weren’t required to respond in order for her to have a full conversation.
“Years ago, when I moved into this house I had a crush on Loic. I thought he was so nice to me, showing me around Paris, the
way he is now with you. He never made a pass at me, but I assumed he was the timid sort, so I decided to make it easy for him, took off all my clothes and called him to my room. And do you know what he did when he saw me on my bed waiting for him? He covered his eyes, told me to get dressed, and left me lying there naked.
Naked
. So I asked him what his problem was and he gave me his miserable, gloomy Loic eyes and said, ‘You’re too good for me, Tarentina.’ I said, ‘Don’t give me that crap, Loic. We both know I’m not too good for anyone,’ but he just walked away. I learned something that day, Lita. I learned all men hate themselves a little bit. Some cases are more severe than others, but each man has a discreet personal self-hatred, and once a girl understands that, it makes dealing with them much easier. Take my father, for example. You know he killed my mother, yes? I’m sure someone told you by now.”
I nodded.
“He thought she was in love with somebody else and maybe she was, but so what? He shot her in the heart and held her as she was dying, cried all over her, and then wrote a stupid note about how he couldn’t forgive himself and that’s why he shot himself in the head. A woman would
never
do that. A woman would wash the blood from her hands, find a way to deny it, and get on with her life. But you see, men are born guilty. Women are built to forgive and love and forgive all over again. Men are built for war and because we live in mostly peaceful times, they just turn on themselves. My point is you have to learn to get through life without being sentimental about boys because they are never worth the trouble.”
“I see.”
“Let’s be honest, Lita. Cato was kind of strange, wasn’t he? He didn’t speak at all that night, just sort of cowered in the corner. There was something primitive about him, like that feral boy they
found running around the forest on all fours years ago. A scientist took him home and tried to make him normal, but he couldn’t handle captivity, so they had to let him loose again.”
“They did?”
“No, I made that up. I don’t know what happened because nobody bothered to keep record. Even freaks become boring after you’ve gotten used to them.”
She had me laughing so much that I didn’t notice the doorbell rang or hear the first time Loic shouted my name through the foyer. Tarentina and I leaned forward to see down the curve of the banister. Standing beside Loic at the bottom of the stairs was Cato, searching the faces of the party, looking everywhere but up, for me.
He kissed me on each cheek. It was the first time.
“I like your dress,” he told me.
I tried not to feel like a sham. I led him to the salon toward the bar. The room, thick with people and music. Romain watched us from behind the bar. He poured us each a glass of the pink punch I’d helped concoct earlier that afternoon. It was made of four or five different cheap rums from Monoprix, assorted juices, and a bag of sugar. Romain had warned us not to drink too much of it—the quality liquor was behind the bar for us residents and our special guests—but Cato took the glass he’d been served and I did, too, though I noticed, as we moved to the wall chatting with Saira and Stef, then Naomi and Rachid, he never took a sip. I didn’t have that kind of restraint, and it seared my throat, but I was too caught up in my growing wonder about Cato. We were quiet, but between us I felt a conversation, taking in the
vibrato of music, a Euro electro pop techno symphony, and the pressure of bodies in the salon around us, until it suddenly became too much for us. We both looked to the glass doors to the garden and then to each other. Cato reached for my elbow and led me as if he were the resident and I were the visitor, through the party crowd to the terrace, across the garden to the stone bench at the far end of the property.
We sat together, maybe too close, because he moved a few inches away, and I worried that maybe Tarentina was right about my repelling him, but then he touched the top of my hand with his fingertips, light and quick, and I stared down at my palm hoping he would do it again. My parents, raised without physical affection, laid it on their children heavily, sloppy with hugs, forever pulling us into their chests, kissing our heads, making a wet mess of our cheeks. But Cato’s touch felt tantalizing and loaded with secrets I wanted for myself.
“I can’t stay long.”
There it was: He was already plotting his escape.
“You don’t say much, Lita.”
“I don’t know what to say most of the time.”
“Say anything. Say what you’re thinking.”
“Why do you have to leave?”
“I told you. I don’t like parties.” He looked toward the house. It was just as Théophile had described, lights like stars replacing those lost in the cloud-quilted sky.
“Which one is your room?”
I pointed to the window above Séraphine’s drawn lace curtains. I’d left my desk light on, my journal open to a blank page.
“I have to leave, Lita.”
“I know. You keep saying that.”
“I have to leave, but I came tonight to ask you if we could spend some more time together before I go back home. Maybe tomorrow, if you’re not busy.”
“When you do leave Paris?”
“I should have left already.”
“Is something waiting for you at home?” I said “something” but I really meant
somebody
.
“Just home.” He stood up. “Can I come for you tomorrow around noon?”
I enjoyed his eyes on me waiting for my answer and the way they shone when I nodded.
“Will you see me to the door?” He reached out his hand until I gave him mine, holding my fingers lightly as we walked toward the house and sliced through the party. I went as far as the bottom of the front steps, fighting the impulse to follow him as he walked away into the falling fog.
We walked all over Saint Germain through the Luxembourg Gardens, down rue Mouffetard across the quai to Île Saint-Louis. We grazed each other’s shoulders when pushing through pedestrian patches but otherwise we did not touch.
We only spoke of the things around us; the street people, like the violinist at Étienne Marcel with the python wrapped around his waist, the guy playing the accordion for money over a drugged cat and dog tucked into a wagon, made to look as if they were sleeping together outside the Printemps department store, or the break-dancers dressed like clowns by the Pompidou. We’d stopped for a coffee at Café Trésor and eavesdropped on an argument between two lovers. They held hands across the small table until he pulled his hand away. He told her he wanted to leave her but she didn’t want to be left. We listened as she pleaded for reasons, and he finally admitted there was someone else, Ophélie, a girl they both knew. I thought she would cry, but she called him connard, stood up, and walked off. I was proud of her. I think we both were.
We walked without a destination, yet I felt something within me take root.
I grasped that I would love him.
To observers we likely appeared as talkative as barnacles, and only knew each other a few days, but this inkling, this awareness, felt as real to me as my sore feet when we stopped so I could sit on the ledge of a shop window and loosen my bootlaces.
We continued in the direction of Place de la Concorde. As we passed the old opera house I asked why we didn’t just jump on the métro. It seemed easier.
“You don’t see anything down there.”
“You see
people
.”
But Cato resisted. “I don’t like the feeling of being underground.”
We took the bus instead. A young couple sat across the aisle from us sucking on each other’s lips. I tried to keep my eyes on the window, on the hordes of tourists swelling from the top of Rivoli to the wooded bottom of Les Champs and the standard clusters of Asian couples on those
Get Married in Paris
package tours posing for photos. He wanted to walk across the Pont Alexandre, his favorite bridge, and when we were halfway across it, he touched my arm.
“This is where we met.”
“No, we met by the torch.”
“No, the bridge. First I was behind you and then I was beside you. It was the first time you looked at me.”
From his pocket he pulled a fat black marker like the one Sharif used that first night to write into the stone wall of the Pont de l’Alma. He leaned over the side of the bridge and reached for the golden chariot hanging above the river and used his sleeve to wipe a small patch of bronze that hadn’t already been tagged with graffiti. He then wrote
Lita et Cato
on the statue and looked to me with a slow smile.
“So when you cross this bridge you’ll remember you were once here with me.”
I thought this would be a great moment for a kiss, but it didn’t happen. We grinned at each other, thunder stirring overhead, and got on our way again.
We were slow, though, and the rain fell fast. Within minutes we were wet, our clothes soupy, rain dripping off our lips and nostrils. We took shelter in the doorways along the quai and finally made it to the House of Stars as the winds picked up. I dropped to the foyer floor, peeling off my boots and waterlogged socks while Cato slipped off his sweatshirt, slim and shivery in his T-shirt, revealing pointy shoulders and a sloped spine. I hadn’t expected him to walk me all the way home, but here he was and I hadn’t yet figured out what to do with him. It was a big house, perfect for parties, but when entertaining just one person, the only place to go, it seemed, was the bedroom.
Séraphine heard us come in and called for me to come to her room. I left him in the foyer and found her in bed, an extra crochet blanket pulled around her shoulders, bifocals on the tip of her nose, and some dusty old book in her lap.
“You fell in the Seine, chérie?”
“The rain caught us.” I pulled my hair off my neck and twisted it into a knot.
“You and the boy?”
“He’s in the foyer.”
“Bring him in.”
I stole a few seconds in the shadows of the corridor, watching him look out to the courtyard as rain rattled the windows. He was beautiful. I understood it when I saw him then, netted in the white and blue glow of the afternoon rain.
“Séraphine wants to meet you.”
I’d told him about her, but not enough to prepare him for the sight of alabaster Séraphine in her antiquarium, reclined like a sphinx. I introduced her the formal way, as Countess, which I think she appreciated. She offered us each a cigarette from her engraved silver case, an especially kind gesture on her part because she kept a separate box of Dunhills for guests and only offered smokes from her personal stash to her favorite people.
I accepted one, but Cato declined.
“You don’t smoke?”
“No, madame. Never.”
Séraphine was immediately suspicious.
“What sort of a name is Cato?”
“A nickname my mother gave me. I’ve been called that way all my life, madame.”
“What is your birth name?”
“Felix.”
“Just Felix?”
“Felix Paul.”
“Felix Paul what?”
“Felix Paul de Manou, madame.”
I slid my unlit cigarette back into Séraphine’s case and stepped back from her bed to the wall, wondering if it was odd that I hadn’t thought to ask his last name and he hadn’t asked mine.
She noticed my retreat, moving her eyes to Cato, to me, to Cato.
“De Manou is not a common name.”
“No, madame. It isn’t.”
“It’s quite an unusual name, in fact. Is it not?”
“Yes, madame.”
“Are you something of …” She paused, cleared her throat, and began again: “Are you something of … of … Antoine de Manou?”
“Yes, madame.”
“He is your …”
She waited but he said nothing.
“He is your … great-uncle?”
“No, madame.”
“No?”
“No.”
“What is he to you then?”
I became annoyed. She never went through this kind of trouble with any of the other guys who came to the house.
“He is my father.”
Séraphine’s eyes went so big they looked taxidermied.
“Your father? That’s impossible.”
I think she expected him to try to convince her otherwise, but he just stood, quietly waiting for whatever came next.
“How old are you, Felix?”
“Twenty-two.”
“You are the son?”
“Yes, madame.”
“Are you aware the rumor is that you are dead?”
I thought that was a rude thing to say no matter what she’d heard but kept quiet.
“As you see, madame, I am not.”
“But your mother?”
“Yes, my mother is dead.”
“But not from the bomb.”
“No. A car accident.”
“Ah, yes, I remember.” It was all coming back to her. “She took you away …”
“She took me to Normandy, madame. She never liked Paris. It was better for us.”
“Is your father still in the Vaneau house?”
“Yes, madame.”
“You never returned to live with him?”
“I prefer the countryside, madame.”
She eyed him. “It must be peaceful. My own doctor often tells me a move to the coast will improve my health. Better quality of air, good for the lungs. What do you think?”
“A fine recommendation, madame, though you have a lovely home here.”
In two minutes, Séraphine had learned more about Cato than I had in six hours of gentle meandering through Paris’s passages. I thought you should let a person tell what they want to tell. When you turn on the questions it gives them the right to do the same to you, and I hated when people asked me about myself—always left with the feeling that no matter what I revealed it was either too much or not enough. That’s why I decided to end the interrogation right then and there and told Séraphine we’d let her get back to her reading.
Cato told her it was lovely to meet her. I started for the door and motioned for Cato to follow, but Séraphine called after our backs.
“Felix, please tell your father that Séraphine de la Roque sends her regards.”
Back in the foyer, he pulled his sweatshirt off the coatrack and threw his arms into the wet fabric. I didn’t want him to leave but I wasn’t ready for him to stay. In my bare feet he was two inches or
so taller than me. We stood by the door and made plans to meet the next afternoon. He didn’t kiss me, not even a good-bye bise, so of course, it was all I could think about as I watched him cross the courtyard in the rain hoping he’d look back at the House of Stars, but he didn’t.
I couldn’t stop Séraphine from spilling to me as soon as Cato was gone: how she’d known Antoine de Manou in the fifties when he was just back from Suez. Then he went to Algeria and she didn’t see him for many years. He was always a jackal, she said, but now he was an old jackal with money and experience and influence, all of life’s most dangerous things. He was on the Parliament until they grew tired of his radical antics. Now he was on the Assembly and had his own political party with the main objective of putting walls around the country to keep out
my
kind. I thought Séraphine meant Americans, but she hooted, “That’s part of your problem, chérie. You don’t even know what you are. But it doesn’t matter your nation or whether you are a street cleaner or a greenblood, because Antoine de Manou hates all foreigners indiscriminately. He’s the worst of France, chérie. The worst. No wonder that boy never mentioned him.”
She told me Antoine’s apartment was bombed when Felix was a baby. It might have been the Basques, Algerians, or Corsicans. It was never decided because so many people hated him. Except his small yet devoted following. Even the devil, Séraphine said, has fans.
“If he has an ounce of his father’s blood, you should be very careful, Leticia.”
I told Séraphine that Cato was different. The only French thing I could point to about him was his language.
“And yet that’s everything.”
“Maybe in your generation. Not in mine.”
“Chérie, a wise man once said racists, misers, and saints are always the last to be aware of their condition.”
“What wise man?”
“My Théophile. He was very wise sometimes.”
“I don’t think it matters who his father is.”
“Of course you don’t.
Your
father is the Colombian Oliver Twist.” She laughed, and I sensed that it wasn’t the first time she’d spoken of my family that way. “You don’t understand lineage and bloodlines and why these things matter. I am starting to think it might be too late for you, Leticia. You might never catch on.”
“We can’t choose our fathers just like we can’t choose our children.”
Though I’d been offended, I regretted my words instantly.
“I’m sorry,” I said but somehow my apology didn’t translate, and Séraphine stared at me, shaking her head slowly.
“You are very young, Leticia. Life has a way of humbling the arrogant. And I am reminded that I am an old, old woman when I look at your face and know that you will not listen to a word I have said.”
I thought of my parents, the moment my mother said she knew she would spend her life with my father. She saw him from her window in the convent. It was an overcast Bogotá day, and he worked on that fence for hours before stopping to eat under a tree on the edge of the convent garden. She couldn’t make out his face, but she said she might as well have been blindfolded, because the feeling had come to her even before he arrived that morning, the knowledge that he was whom she’d been waiting for. They didn’t speak until many weeks later when his work on the fence was nearly
completed and she’d gone out to the garden to bring him a piece of cake left over from a birthday celebration for one of the nuns. To hear it from my father is to hear a recipe, a poem he spoke to the sky every night that he slept in the bed made of old car seats in a corner of his boss’s garage. He’d asked for a woman adrift like him, a woman with whom he could start a family, craft a dream, a woman within whom he could find his purpose, and himself.
My brother and I used to laugh at our parents’ old-world love story. We understood how they’d found refuge in each other, but I think we thought ourselves better than to naively surrender to a divine providence. With our American privilege had come a certain sterility and cynicism that I was surprisingly pleased to now be shedding. It was as if my blood had been moving slowly through me for years, and with Cato my pulse had been altered, changing course. No matter what I was told about the family name that preceded him, I knew I’d found a new piece of my life in Cato, stepping into my fate as if claiming a part of my inheritance.