Two Americans in Paris (31 page)

“It’s important to be with someone you are compatible with. Someone not exactly like you but not your total opposite, either,” Professor advises.

“Exactly!” I say. “I already read big, thick fashion books, sitting right across from you.”

You shake your head, unconvinced. “You’ll be in Boston though.”

“Yeah, but in a few years, I could be anywhere. I could be in Puerto Rico, in Brazil, in China, in London.” Your expression remains hesitant. “I could be in Philly,” I’m quick to add.

“You could.”

Your acknowledgement that our being in the same place may be possible gives me hope that if our locations were to match, we might also be together romantically.

I look into my beer glass, which is as empty as yours and Professor’s. Parting is imminent. I excuse myself to use the bathroom before we go and you join me.

As you follow me up the stairs you say, “This was a great idea!”

“What do you mean?” I’m unsure whether you are happy because we’re going to the bathroom or because of the evening with Professor.

“Going to the bathroom!”

Upon our return to the table, we combine our money to pay for our drinks. On the sidewalk outside the café we hug Professor goodbye. It occurs to me that it is odd to hug our teacher, but the late hour and our tipsiness make it appropriate. Professor gives us directions to guide our way home and we wave goodbye.

I look at my watch, the hands on the clock skidding into each other. I straighten them out and determine it’s one
a.m
. The métro is closed. We’ll be walking home, which will take me about an hour and a half, but for the next hour I will have you at my side.

Our time in Paris will soon be over. The endless efforts I have made to ensure a future for our friendship Stateside make me I feel as if I have placed a target on your head as I once did for Paris when I was seven years old. As though I have personally taken over Cupid’s duties, my bow and arrow are being prepared. One day, when the timing is right, I will loose my arrow and strike you through. I will have you as completely as I have had Paris, which I have enjoyed more completely because I have met you here,
mon cher Paris ami
.

“That was the best night I’ve had in Paris.” You nod, the pleasure you feel pulsing swiftly through your body.

“Me too. I don’t know how Professor didn’t have to pee though!”

“I know . . . I wondered that too. Even I had to use the bathroom!”

“Yeah.” The drink has left me woozy and warm. I feel like the velvety skin of a dove gray stingray is gliding over my toes. “I am so drunk.”

“You’re not that drunk,” you assure me. “As you keep walking, it goes away. You’ll be surprised how quickly the buzz wears off.”

As you said it would, my mind sobers as we walk. I admire the golden light of the old iron lampposts and take pleasure in the roughness of the cobblestones under my feet. I abosrb all of the beauty, treasuring every precious moment. I have so few moments in Paris left, at least for a while. I think, too, that anything could happen between now and when we part.

Without precedent, you exclaim, “Oh, Skeleton told me she’s a lesbian! You woulda had a chance!”

“She’s way too skinny. It’s not attractive. I mean, she looks like a bag of bones. Her fashion sense is edgy, with the cool, patent leather jacket and vintage military shirts. But there is nothing sexy about her unhealthy-looking body.”

“She’s hot,” you disagree. “She has perky tits.”

“It’s disgusting that you find her attractive. She’s anorexic. That’s what anorexic people look like. And I knew she was a lesbian. She brought a girl to class one day.”

“So?”

“Any of our classmates that brought someone with them to class was bringing someone they were dating or sleeping with,” I explain. “None of them brought a friend. Plus, you can just tell by the way they stood near each other. There was a subtle but clear sexual tension.”

We pass a young couple making out on a street corner, their tongues and hands eagerly exploring each other’s bodies. “They look like they’re having fun,” you say. I would like to be doing that with you right now. Since you have pointed out how much fun they appear to be having, I imagine you would like to as well.

We turn onto the Pont Notre Dame to cross from right bank to left, marking our imminent departure from each other.

“Oh, the letter!” you say, reminding me to give it to you.

I pull it from my purse and put it in your hands.

Your eyebrows and cheeks beam up. “The first thing I’m going to do when I get home is read it!”

“No, no! You have to wait until you’re on the train to Vienna,” I insist. “It’s the kind of letter you read when you’re leaving a place. I gave my friend a letter when he was leaving for Madrid. When he read it he cried.”

“Oh, well then.”

“I don’t think you’ll cry. But you have to wait! Until you’re on the train!”

“Okay, okay.”

We near the end of the bridge. “If you just go straight you should run right into Saint-Jacques,” I tell you.

“Hold on, I’m going to check.”

“Are you sure? Notre Dame is right there. You’ll see it in less than a block.”

“Alright. I’ll be back in two minutes.”

As you walk away from me your fair head bobs in the gauzy cloak of shadow. Your eyes lock on the gentle giants of Notre Dame and you come bounding back to me. You stop in front of me and rather than kiss me as I had hoped you might, you slowly wrap me in your warm embrace. You allow your body to stay pressed to mine for minutes I cannot count. Waves of affection emanate from your body, enlivening in me voluptuous pangs of love. Images of our having sex flow through my mind. They tarnish the tenderness of your embrace, so I attempt to suppress them, but they continue to reappear like weeds. Unable to stop them, I allow them to play on. The unprecedented intimacy of our hug inspires me to visualize pale blue arcs of light branching from our bodies, the electric tendrils dancing atop the Seine. I would allow your body to stay pressed to mine forever, but in time you pull back, my stellar darling.

You ask me to call you when you get home, even though you will probably be asleep. We wish each other a safe journey to our next destinations and say goodbye. Before you walk away, I say, “We’ll see each other again,” completely sure of it.

You nod noncommittally. “Probably.” You stride off toward Saint-Jacques, disappearing into the night.

Knowing it will be awhile before we see each other again, I feel relieved to be at least temporarily freed of my ceaseless efforts to be the loveliest companion possible to you. Our youth in Paris has been sealed with one of the finest days in our city either of us has experienced. I can relax now knowing all the elements of our relations have been arranged like bishops and queens across a chessboard in preparation for making you my mate.

As I walk home, my imagination takes a sumptuous flight of fantasy of all the future may hold for us.

On an airless summer evening on the piazza of Parma we watch the slanting rays of the red sun set over the pink marble of the town’s buildings. In Abbotsford House we peruse the stacks of Sir Walter Scott’s enormous library. Our cheek muscles stretch to form Russian words as we chat while crossing the bridge over Lake Seliger on our way to the Nilov Monastery. Its pale blue domes glimmer in the sun.

We walk the grid of New York, sip bowls of coffee while looking out tall French windows at Café Lalo, and sprawl on the lawns of Central Park in the warm summer sun. We picnic in Hyde Park and have high tea in quaint hotel lobbies. The Royal Shakespeare Company’s renditions of Willy’s (as you playfully like to call Shakespeare) plays stir our souls in Stratford-upon-Avon. Afterward, a pair of swans in the nearby lake form a heart with their necks in front of us as the pair of donkeys did for us at Versailles.

From the summit of Machu Picchu, we reconsider Neruda’s book of poems,
The Heights of Machu Picchu
. Atop Arthur’s Seat in Edinburgh, we become teenagers again, fooling around and taking a nap before jaunting back down.

Back in the States, you steadily work to make American education equal for everyone. I write about the fashions of cultures across the globe, encouraging women and men to think more critically about fashion. In my free time, I work to expand the digitization of art so people around the world will have access to artworks they might never see otherwise. We work together and alone, our bond made stronger by our constant support of each other.

One day, when the time is right, we return to Paris. We ride the métro above the Seine with the gold dome of Invalides beaming over the maze of stone buildings. Our home here has a seemingly endless series of rooms lined with our library and a beautiful view of Paris. We write, paint, love, sleep.

Here, in Paris, we raise our children. We sing silly songs with them and teach them the joys of history, books, art, and the natural wonders of our world.

I know that however I imagine our life to be, you will surpass my every expectation, adding your individual quirks and charm. You always do. Your presence is a pleasure far greater than my fantasies of you, for my fantasy is limited by the confines of my own mind. You are limitless.

And yet as I imagine what our life might be like together—the world traveling, the work to improve education and open access to art, the books we would read, the overly idealized children we would raise—I fail to realize that I can do all of these things on my own.

The truth I refuse to face is that for us to ever be happy together romantically, I must relinquish my obsession with you. I must cease to seek your company, messages, and phone calls with the fervor of a drug addict looking for their next fix. I must learn to satisfy myself and be self-sufficient in the pursuit of my own happiness. My happiness must be in no way tied to you. I must learn to be your friend and nothing more than your friend. Only once I have learned all of this can I become satisfied within myself, and only then could I be in a healthy relationship with you or anyone else.

It is a great paradox—that I must learn to not need you in order to have you. The irony, too, is that once I have learned to not need you, I may realize I do not want you, even as a friend. Although I have rhapsodized about you constantly over the past couple months, your flaws have not gone unnoticed. Your treatment of me has displayed inconsiderateness, selfishness, laziness, and dishonesty. I wouldn’t tolerate any of these qualities in my friends or romantic partners. Your intelligence, wit, charm, and our bond—that deeply personal feeling of being blissfully in-tune with you—have made me see your bad behaviors as excusable and given me hope that you will mature with time.

But my making excuses for you is a symptom of my ignorance. My hopes are naive. I haven’t yet realized that I don’t need you. If things don’t work out with you, I can achieve on my own all I have imagined we might do together. If I want to, I could even find someone like Professor to share my life with.

I am a resourceful, intelligent woman. I’m eager to learn from my mistakes and do better next time. Even though I don’t see you as a mistake now, I will likely see you that way later. When I do, I will have to let go of my care and love for you. It’s a waste of my energy that could be used to accomplish better things. Moving on from you may be one of the most challenging tasks I ever face, but if I set my mind to something, I do it. No matter how long it takes or how hard it is.

My next task is to write-out my obsession with you. I will flush it out onto the page in its most treacherous and truthful form. And I look forward to it.

My flight from Paris to New York has a layover in Dublin. As soon as the plane lands, I have a compulsive need to expel our summer-in-Paris love story onto paper. I feel if I do not start writing soon, the words will explode from within me like a broken fire hydrant spraying high-pressure water indiscriminately over everything.

Although I nearly always have spare scraps of paper in my purse, I threw them all away when I was packing. I frantically search the airport for a bookstore that carries notebooks. The first two bookstores I find have only books and magazines, but the third has notebooks decorated with four-leaf clovers. I buy a small one.

With the plane’s wings stretched over the Atlantic Ocean I write:

I am sitting here, betwixt your fingers and thumbs

              . . . slipping along the slip of your back

. . . pouring around your heavy, worn feet.

I am sitting here, between your smooth, small ears, blowing softly on the hard coils and infinite structures of your brain. The moist droplets of my breath cling to your memories: soft, warm, and deep.

I am sitting here, enthroned in your flesh. Your nipples sit flush over mine and our hearts beat in a harmonic melodic symphonic rhythm.

Only the great nave of Cathédrale Saint-Sulpice filled with a Beethoven sonata could dare to sway me from my place.

My place is here, Miss America, between Open Roads and Swift Rivers. Among the Great Cornfields and Open Grasslands, clipped between New England cobblestone and burning cement.

My lust burrows into your prairie dog holes, tunnels through mole holes, and emerges from the deep recesses of Earth in a fiery torrent volcanic eruption Mauna Loa.

She curls through the wind and binds to frozen evergreens, awaiting her Spring Awakening. She waits silent, patient, stealthy: listens to the wood chuck chuck and turns her head 360° round – smell crisp forest green; hint of sweet doe breath.

The End