Authors: Christine Sneed
“Why do you have to live so far away?” she asked as we lay in bed on her third morning in Paris. “It’s amazing here, of course, and Laurent seems nice, but I miss you. Don’t you miss me?”
“Of course I do,” I whispered.
Her laugh was a throaty rasp. “You’d never know. We haven’t lived in the same city for more than twelve years.”
“I’m working on an invention,” I said. “Not sunglasses for dogs, but a teleportation device. Don’t tell anyone. I don’t want anyone to steal my blueprints.”
She croaked out another laugh. “Don’t forget to bring me some cheese when you use your device. And a baguette. You’ll have to make sure you figure out how to bring luggage too.”
After she took a shower and had some coffee, along with a
chausson aux pommes
—the flaky apple pastry she preferred to a plain croissant or a
pain au chocolat
—she was usually revived, and we would set off for the museum or neighborhood or shopping district she wanted to see that day. I took her to the Porte de Clignancourt to visit the sprawling flea market near the city’s northern periphery, where I would also take our parents—who were more affectionate with each other, on the whole, than I’d seen them be in years—when they came in the spring, but Stephanie was bored after an hour of looking at antiques and knick-knacks, and I took her back into the center of Paris to walk along the narrow streets near the Sorbonne and through the Jardin du Luxembourg.
During our wanderings around the city, she grilled me about my life with Laurent, whom she liked, she said, but thought was too old for me, as I knew our mother also did. “He reminds me of Uncle Hugh,” she said. “Around the eyes, and his voice. They kind of dress alike too.”
Hugh was our mother’s younger brother, and he spent a lot of money on his clothes and hair. He was divorced, no kids, lived in Dallas, and was probably gay, but he had never come out to anyone in the family.
“I don’t think so,” I said. “Hugh’s voice is more nasally, for one.”
“No, but there’s still something about the way Laurent speaks that reminds me of him.”
“I don’t hear it,” I said.
“Well, I do,” she said. “You just don’t want me to compare your boyfriend to our gay uncle.”
“Compare them all you want,” I said. “Doesn’t matter to me.”
“Really,” she said. “Could have fooled me.”
I knew before she’d arrived that we’d probably bicker during her visit, out of lifelong habit, but also because of her unhappiness with her own life, her job and feelings of stagnation. She wasn’t dating anyone seriously either, and here I was—more or less well rested, not worrying about money, working on paintings that I was interested in, enjoying some success in my chosen field, living in a city I loved. I hadn’t told her about my suspicions that Laurent saw other women. I didn’t want her to have this on me, even if it might have made her feel better. What I recognized was how much importance I’d begun to place on people no longer pitying or feeling superior to me. I’d had enough of that, probably enough to last my whole life, when I lived in New York.
Stephanie was thinking of going to law school but didn’t know—as I’d also felt about getting an M.F.A.—if she wanted to take out more loans and go back to the shabby-genteel student lifestyle. “I’m almost twenty-nine,” she said. “I’d be the oldest person in the class.”
“I doubt it,” I said. “And that shouldn’t stop you, if you do want to go.”
She shook her head. “Easy for you to say. Your sugar daddy would pay your bills if you wanted to go.”
“He’s not my sugar daddy,” I said.
“He’s not?”
“No, he’s my boyfriend.”
“If you say so, Jayne.”
Don’t be such a bitch, I almost said, but knew we’d launch into a full-blown fight if I did. This was her last morning and instead, I forced myself to change the subject. “Do you want to go out for dinner tonight?” I asked. “Or I could make a big salad and some penne with asparagus and peas.”
“Look at you,” she said. “The master chef.” To my surprise, she didn’t say this maliciously. She was smiling now, her mood swinging back to amiable. “Let’s eat here. That sounds good.”
“But we can go out for lunch,” I said. “Falafel sandwiches. I’ll take you to rue Montorgeuil. It’s a fun street with a lot of little shops that you’d probably like to browse.”
“I’m ready,” she said, though she was in her robe and her hair was still wet from her shower.
“Ten minutes,” I said.
“Fifteen,” she said.
“Twelve and a half. I’m setting a timer.” I waved my phone at her.
She laughed. “I wouldn’t put it past you.”
After lunch, as we were walking past Saint-Eustache, Stephanie asked if Laurent liked her. He’d been nice enough but hadn’t really tried to talk to her. Hadn’t I noticed this too? I had noticed, but it hadn’t bothered me very much. He didn’t like small talk, in part because he was required to make a lot of it in order to stay in business. I told Stephanie that he did like her, which is what he’d told me.
“Really?” she said. “Because he’s only had dinner with us twice.”
“He wanted us to have time to ourselves,” I said. “He wouldn’t know most of the people we talk about anyway.”
“I thought it was because he didn’t like me.”
“No, Stephanie,” I said. “That’s not the case at all.”
“Maybe when you move back to the States, if you ever do, you could live in L.A. again,” she said.
“Or you could move to New York.”
She shook her head. “No. I don’t do winters. Do you think I’d put up with all the bullshit in L.A. if I didn’t love the weather there so much?”
I’d only been living in Paris for a little more than two months when my sister came to see me, and was just starting to internalize that this wasn’t a vacation, that I was an inhabitant, not a visitor. It made me pause. I think I felt afraid, almost—as if I were a refugee and would never be able to return to my country of origin. I knew this was foolish, like how I’d felt as a small girl when the tub was draining after my bath—I’d been afraid that I’d go down into the pipes with the dirty water. Foolish, yes, but it was how I felt sometimes.
At certain times of day, midmorning or early afternoon usually, when I am walking alone, down the sloping streets of the eighth arrondissement toward the Seine, passing the sleek fortresses that house the most powerful politicians in France, I feel my skin prickling with possibility. I am closer to my twenty-year-old self here, closer than I am at home. Almost no one knows me here, and this feels like a gift. It is true that hardly anyone knows me in New York either, but I could not have started over there as I have here. The plane trees along the Seine, their leaves’ coin-like rustling, the light that threads its way through the gaps between the branches and each perfect, ephemeral leaf—I know that I will only feel this way here. I might feel like this for the rest of my life if I decide to stay. But of course I can only know this if I do.
I still wonder if what has happened during the months I’ve lived with Laurent should simply be considered a kind of adult education, training for the rest of life, like a college program that teaches you to become a more fully developed person. My jealousy, unease, and suspicion, along with the physical and material comforts, the affection, the leisure, the time to paint, the enormous generosity he has extended to me by showing my work along with Susan’s, the boost he has given me into the hierarchy of artists—I know, oh, I know. There is nothing I could ever do for him that would be even half as meaningful.
It’s been several weeks now since the opening. My parents came over for the second week of April and got along fine (for my benefit? I hope not—they seemed so much themselves, and if this was all subterfuge, they should be auditioning for Hollywood movies) but my father, predictably, was alarmed by how expensive everything was. This was the first time they’d visited Paris together, and even though I asked them to stay with Laurent and me, they didn’t want to impose, and decided to reserve a room in what turned out to be a flea trap up by the Gare du Nord, the kind of place my friends and I paid forty dollars a night for during our semester abroad. My father justified his ingrained cheapness by saying they would have a more salt-of-the-earth experience (“But you’ll be in Paris, which is not a salt-of-the-earth kind of place,” I said) if they stayed in a dive, not realizing a French dive is different from a mostly clean Super 8, but after the first night, my mother had said “Enough,” and they reserved a room at the Hotel Esmérelda on the Left Bank, just across from Notre Dame. It isn’t the fanciest place either, but it was cleaner, and the room was bigger; it was also three times as expensive as the Gare du Nord flea trap.
My mother cried when she saw my paintings at Vie Bohème. She once wanted to sing and write songs like Joan Baez, and she has long claimed responsibility for my artistic leanings. “Jayne, honey, this is wonderful,” she said, her eyes filled with tears. “Your father and I are so proud of you. I’m glad you kept pushing us to send you to that summer class in Chicago. It was a good investment.”
“Did I really push that much?” I asked, a little ashamed. I’d minored in studio art in college too, but I didn’t remind her of this.
“No, you didn’t,” said my father, who was looking closely at
Joanie
. “Do I know this woman?”
“I don’t think so, Dad,” I said. “She was in a photograph taken forty-five years ago in Salinas with a guy named Jim.”
“She looks like one of my high school English teachers,” he said. “It could be her, but I don’t remember if her first name was Joanie.”
“You grew up in Danville, Illinois,” my mother said. “I doubt it’s her.”
“She might have been on vacation in Salinas,” he said.
My mother gave him a derisive look—her mouth half open, ready to laugh—that I had seen on her face many times before, and I cringed. But instead of reacting to her, my father looked back at
Joanie
, and my mother turned to me. “We weren’t sure what to expect from your show here,” she said. “You wouldn’t tell us much at Christmas about what you were working on.”
“Kendra, come on,” said my father. “We knew it’d be good.”
“You’ve seen my work,” I said. “You know that I do figurative and narrative paintings, not abstract ones. There’s nothing really inscrutable about my work.”
“Yes, but how did we know that you wouldn’t be trying something else this time?” she said.
My father gave me a look of commiseration. “Is Laurent going to show your work in his New York gallery too?”
This would be the first time I’d spoken of the possibility with anyone but Laurent. The idea of it made me almost sick with anticipation and fear that it wouldn’t happen. “Sometime next year, maybe,” I said, “but we’ve just started talking about it, so I’m not sure if it’ll actually happen.”
“That would be marvelous, wouldn’t it, sweetie?” my mother exclaimed. “You’ve always wanted a show in New York.” She grabbed my arm and squeezed it, her face glowing. She looked very pretty in her pink dress and cream-colored raincoat, her thick, silver-streaked brown hair pinned up, pearls in her ears and at her throat. My sister and I have always envied her long, healthy hair; ours is like our father’s—finer and flyaway if not conditioned enough.
Mom was charged up on coffee and sugar from the pastries we’d had before coming to Vie Bohème around four o’clock. Dad, the skin under his eyes loose and violet-tinted, looked as if he needed a nap. It was their first full day in Paris, and their trip from California had taken all day and night.
“We’ll see,” said my father. “Let’s not get too carried away.”
“No,” I said. “I’m not holding my breath.” But I suppose that in truth, I was. If Laurent had suggested showing my work in the Chelsea Vie Bohème, I knew that he wasn’t kidding. The four of my five paintings that had so far sold had earned respectable sums, and he had told me the day before my parents’ arrival that someone was interested in the fifth.
They knew very little about my life in Paris, I realized. They stumbled around, half listening to my tour-guide narrative, staring up at the rooflines, at the hovering golden dome of the Hotel des Invalides in the distance, at the eerie, skeletal Eiffel Tower. Each time my mother spotted it, she murmured hopefully, “Oh, there it is,” as if it were a herald of her future too.
I knew that I wasn’t ready to leave Paris yet as we walked together or rode the Metro around the city, emerging from the subways into the sunlight or the benign glow of the streetlamps. Even though many days still felt as fresh as my first day here last June, it’s hard to understand how much your city, adopted or native, means to you until you show off its treasures to someone for whom the landmarks and cafés and shops haven’t become common sights, or, in some cases, all but invisible. I intended to stay in Paris, at least through the summer; I decided this as my parents and I walked down through the north side of the Left Bank on our way to the Jardin du Luxembourg.
Whatever he might have felt in his secret heart, Laurent seemed in no hurry for me to leave his apartment. He liked having me there, painting in his study, working at the gallery too; he liked eating the food I was teaching myself how to cook with more pleasure and inspiration now that, for the first time since college, I had the time to do it properly. I could feel, however, that by small increments, Laurent was receding from me emotionally. It wasn’t just the unacknowledged infidelities. He was uncomfortable with my friendship with Jeanne-Lucie; he did not think it appropriate or else was simply jealous and wary of our regard for each other. When I mentioned that she wanted to travel with me to New York, he was instantly resistant to the idea but tried to make it seem as if I shouldn’t be away from my painting for so many days at a stretch, as if I was in danger of missing a deadline. He also implied that he would not pay for any part of it, that I was on my own in this respect. What I didn’t tell him was that Jeanne-Lucie had insisted that she pay for our hotel room, and I need only buy my plane ticket. Food we didn’t discuss, but I could cover that too, provided she didn’t intend for us to go to Per Se or Le Cirque (or, God forbid, both).