It's Not Love, It's Just Paris (18 page)

Séraphine was right when she said good-byes don’t serve anyone. We’d stayed up in Tarentina’s room until near dawn, and when Cato and I returned to my room, the bed stripped of its sheets, I gathered the few things I had left to pack.

Cato helped the driver load my suitcases into his taxi, as I crept into each of the girls’ rooms to hug them good-bye in their half sleep. I knew I’d see them all again.

I’d said good-bye to Loic early in the evening, thanking him for his kindness and for all he’d done to make me feel welcome in the house. I told him he was right, it was just as he’d promised, I’d been very happy there.

I stood alone in the foyer taking one long last look. I walked down the hall to Séraphine’s room but found it had been locked and whispered good-bye through the door, hoping, wherever she was, she could hear me. I remembered when she used to say she’d outlived everyone she’d ever cared about, but it was no reason to feel sorry for her, because she’d loved so well in her life, passionément, à la folie, which is more than anyone should ever want from a life, and because, she told me, those you love deeply never disappear.

Through the help of one of Sharif’s connections, Cato found what was likely the last available room in Paris in a quiet hotel in Montmartre, far from rue du Bac and all that was familiar to us. We wanted to spend our last day and night as tourists. We wanted to pretend we were a young couple coming to Paris for the first time, on our honeymoon, discovering the city through a small window with a view to a thousand chimneys, mansards, and alleyways. We fed bread crumbs to the pigeons on the small ledge of the balcony and soaked in the claw-foot tub.

I took Cato’s water-shriveled hands in mine and showed them to him.

“This is how we’ll look when we’re old.”

I didn’t yet know, didn’t yet understand, despite all the ways he tried to tell me, that he would never grow old the way I would. In that hotel room, we still played at a future together. He held me close, within his thighs, his arms tight around me as the bathwater turned cold, telling me that this winter he’d come visit me in the States. Or we could go somewhere else together. We could take a trip, to an island, to the other side of the world, to Leticia. He didn’t care about the dangers to his lungs anymore. He was angry for the way he’d been raised to fear life and for accepting the limitations on his body. He didn’t know how much life he had ahead of him but he wanted to run into it, fearless. He said he’d wasted too many years in that house by the sea. He didn’t want to go back there now. Not without me.

I told him we’d do all the things he wanted to do.

We would go everywhere, together.

And I believed it.

I was still full of hope. I thought we had our whole lives ahead of us. I could do everything I needed to do and still find my way back to him.

I didn’t yet know what was written for us.

The next morning at the Charles de Gaulle Airport I would run into Romain, who, as vowed, had booked a one-way ticket to New York and found an open seat on the flight after mine.

Within days of my return home, as long as it took to recover from the time difference and unpack my bags, I would be treated as if I’d never left. My family would stop asking to hear about my year abroad, and I would recalibrate, adjusting to the new anchor of home while remembering, only privately, my other homes: the little bedroom in the House of Stars and Cato’s dark cavern in the house by the sea.

Instead of going back to school for diplomacy, I would become a teacher and build on my mother’s volunteer efforts, the expansion of the philanthropic arm of Compa’ Foods. I would look after my brother, see him through to his graduation and then college, help him find a new yet forever precarious stability in his routines.

I’d work hard. I’d believe I was content, productive. Useful. Fulfilled.

On most days I would feel I was doing all I’d been born to do.

I would think of Cato often.

Those first years apart, we would write, call, and plan visits that would be postponed, rescheduled, and eventually canceled because some duty, some obligation on my part, would always interfere. I’d promise to go see him as soon as I could, as soon as my life allowed it, but my promises began to feel hollow, even to me.

Slowly, I would become more of a coward; gutless, pusillanimous like Romain’s jellyfish, telling myself it was best to let the
distance grow between us. It was the logical thing. I would tell myself ours was a beautiful story but it must be over now. He couldn’t possibly still love me. Not after all this time.

The years would unfold as Tarentina predicted. Some of the girls would hold on and some would let go. Five years after leaving, I would return to France for her wedding, and by then I would have convinced myself Cato had forgotten me and was living life contentedly with a woman better suited for him. I would eventually find a way to live mine with another man, an old college friend of my brother’s, a political journalist with a pilot’s license.

That night in the Montmartre hotel room I shared with Cato, I didn’t yet know, or perhaps I did know, in some hidden part of my interior, that eleven years from now, in an apartment I shared with my new fiancé, I would receive a phone call that would ruin me for years.

I’d hear the voice of a woman asking me in French to hold the line for Monsieur Antoine de Manou. And then I would hear the voice of a very old man.

“Is that Leticia?”

“Yes, it is.”

“Leticia, I am calling to inform you … of … of very unfortunate news.”

I knew then. He didn’t have to say more.

I felt my soul fall out of me.

“My son, Felix, has died. He was convalesced with a persistent bronchial pneumonia for several months. I am told by his doctors that he passed away in his sleep. The service will be this Friday for the family. In fact only Sharif and myself will be in attendance, with Mireille, who took care of him as a boy. With your permission
I will have my secretary arrange a plane ticket for you. I thought you should want to join us.”

I was raw with shame for the ways I’d deserted him, and for the fraud of love I’d erected in his place.

To forgive myself, an impossibility.

There he lay before me once again, at the foot of the altar of La Madeleine, sleeping.

How arrogant and how naive to believe we’d had time when time is the one thing each of us has so little of.

That final night in Paris, he pressed his body far inside me, whispering into my ear, “I would give you everything if I had anything to give you.”

“You already gave me everything. And you have all of me.”

“Say you choose me.”

“I choose you.”

“And I choose you.”

When we were through we studied each other’s faces from across the pillow. I don’t know if he’d felt the urgency as much as I did during those closing days in the pulsing pink summer of Paris, the compulsion to memorize it all then, as it would be a long time before I’d walk those streets again. I’d silently meditated on the finality of even the most insignificant things, like my last shower in the stark House of Stars bath, my last cigarette smoked on our terrace, the last time I dropped my laundry at the wash-and-fold across the way, and tried to ignore the heaving in my chest when Cato and I took our last trip to Blonville-sur-Mer, that last train back to Paris, and the final walk together over the smooth stone path of our bridge.

“You’re beautiful,” I said. “There is no one more beautiful than you.”

He reached for my hand.

“You should have married me when I asked you to. We could have been married all this time. And you would leave me as my wife, and when you come back to me, I will still be your husband.”

“I’ll marry you now.”

That night the Basilica of Sacré-Coeur was open and nearly empty except for a few prayerful people scattered in pews. It was ten o’clock at night, and I remember a short old man selling postcards and snow globes on the front steps warned us the church would be closing very soon.

We walked straight to the back of the church and found ourselves alone in the small chapel behind the altar. We said our vows. We said we chose each other. And we kissed with only statues as witnesses.

I left him the next morning lying in the mess of sheets, his skin pale against the white cotton. He watched me dress. A taxi waited on the street to take me to the airport, but I told him not to come along. I wanted to go alone. I wanted to remember him like this. His lips still fresh with me. With love in his eyes.

I am profoundly grateful to Ayesha Pande, Lauren Wein, Elisabeth Schmitz, Jessica Monahan, Deb Seager, and everyone at Grove for their kindness and very hard work. My thanks to all my family and the many dear friends, near and far, who’ve offered their continued support, especially the real girls of rue du Bac for whom this book was written with great affection as promised so long ago. My deepest gratitude and love goes to my brother, his family, and above all, to my parents.

P
ATRICIA
E
NGEL
’s debut,
Vida
, was a
New York Times
Notable Book of the Year; finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Fiction Award and Young Lions Fiction Award; winner of a Florida Book Award and an Independent Publisher Book Award; and was named a Best Book of the Year by NPR, Barnes & Noble, and
L.A. Weekly
.

Her award-winning fiction has appeared in
A Public Space, The Atlantic, Boston Review, Guernica, Harvard Review
, and elsewhere. She lives in Miami.

Visit
www.AuthorTracker.com
for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins authors.

“[Engel’s] ability to pierce the hearts of her crazy-ass characters, to fracture a moment into its elementary particles of yearning, cruelty, love, and confusion will leave you breathless. Here, friends, is the debut I have been waiting for.”

J
UNOT
D
ĺAZ

“[Written with] unsparing psychological precision. … What makes Sabina’s coming-of-age story so compelling is the arresting voice Engel has fashioned for her: a voice that’s immediate, unsentimental, and disarmingly direct.”

M
ICHIKO
K
AKUTANI
,
The New York Times

“Arresting. … A tingle of recognition builds as detail after detail sings with the veracity of real life. … It’s the true-to-life version of the
The Virgin Suicides
, as vivid and revealing, in its way, as Jeffrey Eugenides’s novel.”

The New York Times Book Review

“[A] vibrant new voice. 
 Unforgettable.” E
LISSA
S
CHAPPELL
,
Vanity Fair

“[Engel’s] chiseled prose (precise and unforgiving as a boxer’s jab) and tender knowledge [prove] that yearning for meaning sometimes breathes under the thickest hides.” O
SCAR
V
ILLALON
, NPR.org

Vida

Cover image © par Etienne Cazin / Getty Images
Author photo: Elliot + Erick Jimenez

It’s Not Love, It’s Just Paris
Copyright © 2013 by Patricia Engel.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

EPub Edition © JULY 2013 ISBN 9781443423618

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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication information Engel, Patricia
It’s not love, it’s just Paris / Patricia Engel.

ISBN 978-1-44342-345-8

I. Title.
PS3605.N44I87 2013  813’.6  C2012-908517-0

RRD 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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