Paris Was the Place (16 page)

“I don’t need to wear a bra. I’ve never needed a bra.”

“What I need to know is, does this Macon understand the music of Earth, Wind and Fire?”

“Not sure.”

“You need to tell me every minuscule thing. Start at the top of his head and work your way down.”

I lean back against the headboard. “I thought you had a movie.”

“This is what we’ve been waiting for! You have a sex life!”

“I have the idea of a sex life.”

“Tell me everything.”

“He has a dimple on his right cheek when he smiles. He only drinks red wine. He speaks English well. He likes to go on at least four dates before making love.”

“Which means you haven’t yet?”

“Haven’t gone on the dates?”

“Made love. What if he’s really good in bed? I mean stupendously good.”

“What a great thing for me, then.”

“What if he’s bad? You’re camping on this beach? What if you wake up the next morning and want to run and can’t find a taxi? What if there aren’t any taxis?”

“This is so unhelpful. Thank you for this.”

“I try.”

“I think I’m going to get in a car with him on Friday morning and drive. I think I feel more connected to him than I have with any other man before.”

“Do you own a bathing suit?”

“Oh, God. I don’t think so.”

“We’ll meet after your school tomorrow and find you one. You can’t go to the south of France with a lover and no bikini.”

“God, I hate that word. It’s ridiculous—‘lover.’ ”

“You’re going to be sleeping together on the beach. Call it what you want.”

“I’m going now. I’ll meet you tomorrow. I’m scared of where you’re going to take me.”

“I know a few shops.”

“I’m hanging up. I don’t have money for Norma Kamali bikinis.”

“There’s a foundation I’ve heard of that has funds for celibate American poetry teachers in France in need of bikinis.”

“Hanging up now. I love you. Good-bye.”

Macon pulls up to the curb outside my building on Friday in a small blue pickup truck, not a car. I walk into the street and lean my face through the driver’s window. He smells of pears and white soap. “Good morning.” Then I say it again. “Good morning.” It’s almost like tasting him to breathe him in like this. Nine o’clock in the morning and warmer than it’s been all year. The poplars look like they’re wearing green headdresses—full and leafy.

I pat the hood of the truck like it’s a dog. “You got a nice,
petit, bébé
truck.” It’s a Renault with a square cab and round hubcaps, and some kind of plaid synthetic fabric over the bench seat.

“You like it?” He taps the dashboard with his fingers and grins that grin. “I borrowed it from a law student interning at the office. We’re starting small. We wouldn’t want a truck we couldn’t handle.”

I make myself walk slowly to the passenger side—walk, don’t run—and hoist my tote bag up onto the floor. I’m nervous. “I’ve found a new word.” I’m driving away from the city with Gita’s lawyer, and no one at the center knows about it. I haven’t left Paris since I got here in September. “I called the school last night.” I try to slow myself down. “I told them I was coming down with the pip.”

“You didn’t.” He raises his eyebrows. They’re the same shade of
brown as his eyelashes. Everything about him looks big for the small truck—his legs, his hands.

“I learned it from Polly. My British friend in the drama department. The pip is vague enough to cover lots of symptoms.” I glance up once at my apartment. The iron balcony looks like cake decoration from down here, with thick florettes and black metal leaves.

“I know the pip.” He clicks the left blinker and puts the truck in first gear. We head south to Rue Daubenton over a series of cobblestone blocks lined with leaking gutters and sagging electrical lines. I imagine my apartment then. I like that apartment. The balcony looked good enough to eat. Where are we going? And who is he? This man? A diesel bus grinds its gears and releases a blast of smoke and we’re thrown back into the late twentieth century. Then we’re on a wider avenue that runs along the front of the Jardin des Plantes. I think it’s called St. Hilaire, or maybe that’s just the last part; some of the street names here are so incredibly long. I try to stay hopeful. We’re driving to the beach. Paris-the-movie unfolds while he drives us through the narrow streets. The city looks different to me already. It’s the effect of being inside the truck with him. I belong here more now. In France. Simply because somebody wants to drive with me. It’s small but it’s also everything.

The gardens even look different. The plants are a study in the most beautiful greens, with high and low manicured shrubbery and small banks of hedges and rosebushes. Is it the idea of love that does this? Gives the city this backlighting and connects me to it? If I let myself believe I can love Macon, then everything else in my life seems possible. Completely surmountable. I decide then that the greatest thing in the world is to long for someone and then to get to sit next to them in a small French truck driving south toward Lyon.

“We had the pip in Toronto.” Macon laughs this time. “American girls get colds. They get stuffy noses. Or the flu. Not the pip. Your school will know you made it up.” I stare at him while he drives and wonder if I’ll love him. Truly love him.

“No. No, they won’t. Today marks the beginning of my life with
the pip. What I want to know is if symptoms include the need to drive all day in a small truck down the center of France?”

“They often do.” His fingers are tapered, with nails that could use attention.

“And camp on a beach with a man you don’t know?”

“Very common.”

We pass through the fifth on Avenue des Gobelins. The rattan chairs are filled with Parisians smoking cigarettes and reading
Le Monde
or
Le Figaro
and drinking coffee. The thirteenth sits directly under the fifth, and the buildings here are taller and modern. We crawl around a traffic circle at the Place d’Italie, where a small orchard of magnolia trees blooms pink in the middle. Farther into the thirteenth we pass a check-cashing center and a string of Asian restaurants and food stalls. Have we changed continents? Luke will sometimes come down here to Chinatown between Avenue d’Italie and Avenue de Choisy to shop. There’s a spice in Sichuan cooking that he loves called
ma
, which makes my tongue go numb, and he can only get it here. Luke feels far away now, even though we’re still in the city. So do my father and Sara. Everything’s been reordered. I’m calling it
the truck of requited longing
in my head. It’s Macon and me and my mother driving to the beach. She’s still with me. Smiling. Watching. She’s often with me. She doesn’t obstruct, now that she’s dead. She just helps me.

“Did you bring anything?” Macon nods toward the tape deck. The blue street sign at Porte d’Italie reads
A6/LYON/BORDEAUX/NANTES/AÉROPORT D’ORLY
. “I remembered sleeping bags and wine. But I forgot music.” He hunches forward until he’s hugging the steering wheel with both arms. I have the urge to give away all my secrets to him. Right now. All of them. And to see if he receives them or turns away. This is the part of myself I’m trying to calibrate. He smiles. “How can there be a road trip through France without music?”

We pass the exit for Orly Airport and the parking garages off the highway. I peel a tangerine to calm down. “I have music.” The rind piles in my lap. I paw through my bag again. The suburbs give way to
small fields. There are goats in fenced-in plots and stone farmhouses so close to the city. “I have music if you like Rickie Lee Jones.”

I put the tape in. The song’s “Chuck E.’s in Love.” When Sara and I weren’t nurturing our Bob Dylan obsession, we were deep into Rickie Lee Jones. This meant we grew our hair long and wore hats and long silk scarves.

“What is this song?”

“This song”—I roll my window up halfway—“is so good that I spent whole days playing it in my bedroom in college. The singer is in a pool hall. The boy she loves goes after another girl.”

I put my hand out so it cuts through the wall of wind, which whips my hair around my face and up above my head. Another hour passes. Paris feels far behind. The fields are bigger now. Each plowed into a different-sized rectangle and conjoined into a patchwork of light brown soil and darker soil and chartreuse leaves. It’s just after eleven in the morning and the greenish-white tips of the trees sparkle in the sun and everything is within reach. Love. Sex. Belonging. It’s all always just within reach. Loneliness is vanquished. The bass of the song travels to my stomach and feels so good. Exhilarating even. Gone is that feeling of being just a foreigner watching. Of one step removed. “Did you listen to music growing up in Canada?” I peel another tangerine.

“Estonian folk songs.” He says this with a straight face.

“Hah.”

“My mother played albums on a gramophone.”

“How could you miss one of the most important women singers of the 1980s?”

“Willie. I think I am a lot older than you. Either that, or I’m too busy constructing court cases.”

I put my bare feet up on the dashboard and press my knees together. “Do you think you’ve got a case built for Gita? Do you have enough material? Do you have enough facts?”

“That is work, and this trip is play. You are considerate to worry. But that is my job. I take it very seriously. I will do everything I can.”

“Gita isn’t work, Macon. Gita is our friend.”

“Your friend. Your student. My client. Yes, of course I am working on it.” He can shut off like this and sit in the quiet. Me, I’m trained to fill empty spaces. Maybe Macon doesn’t subscribe to small lies out of convenience to please people. My mother was like that, too. She didn’t believe in half-truths. She would have never called Luelle at the academy to say she was coming down with the pip. She would have said she was going away to the beach. Who knows with my mother?

“God, I never knew how much farming went on in this small country.” I stretch my arms out and almost touch his shoulder with my left hand.

“France is surprisingly self-sufficient and proud. Very proud. I love this country.”

Every five miles or so there’s a wooden farmhouse in between the fields and barns and equipment sheds. Then, every twenty miles, there’s a village built from coffee-colored stone. Rows of leggy trees stand in a green boundary line at the town’s edge before the fields begin again. From here the villages look happy to be left behind by the highway. The flat roofs create a line in the sky that remains in my mind long after we’ve passed by, asking, What would it be like to live here? What is your old life that you could leave it behind?

We drive south and slightly west so we miss Dijon. I nap sitting up, but I don’t have any memory of napping. I look at my watch when I wake, and four hours have passed since we left Paris. My lips are chapped. There’s that twang again of being the outsider. Just one string of it but it’s there while I’m still half-asleep. We’re far from Paris now. I hope it’s good. The kissing. The beach. The fields give way to thick forests of pine trees and bigger towns way off in the distance, built along steep hills and ravines.

There are signs for Beaune. Then Chalon-sur-Saône. Newer towns appear, rippling in concentric circles from a center I can’t see. I can only make out the farthest subdivisions—rows of small, square, stucco houses and red tin roofs. It feels like we’re driving across the whole country in one day. The truck eats up the miles. “France is so small,” I say. “So incredibly small.” Everything in the truck now seems to be about the mediated space on the seat between us and the kissing
and his collarbones. Where will we sleep? Am I crazed? Maybe I shouldn’t have come. Talking helps, but he doesn’t mind long silences, and I can only talk so much. It’s ridiculous—driving away from my job. I like that job. I need it. I’ve worked there for six months almost to the day.

Five hours pass, and we get to a puzzle of off-ramps and small highways circling Lyon. It’s a bigger, industrial city with snarls of traffic and long lines of French trucks with canvas tarps covering their loads. Then the road opens up again and winds through orchards and over small sloping hills. It’s past two. I slip in a tape by Los Lobos and Macon puts his hand on my knee. I want to sing now but I don’t know any of the words, so I hum, confined to body language. Willing his hand to stay on my knee where it is burning an imprint.

I’m ready for whatever happens between us. But how do I say this? He pulls me closer with his free arm. “Spanish lyrics.” He laughs. “You’re humming in Spanish.” We come up quickly on a white Peugeot, and before we incorporate it into our grille, Macon takes his hand off my leg and pulls out to pass.

“That was close.” I will the hand back. “Name two places in the world you most want to go.”

“Tartu.” He needs both hands on the steering wheel now.

“Tar—what?”

“In Estonia. Near the Baltic Sea. Tartu. It’s the city my family comes from.”

I cross one leg under the other. “Do they speak Russian? Estonian? Or what language there?”

“It’s Russian, yes, and French.” He passes a large black truck on the hill. “I’ll get there. There’s still a house my parents own.” He’s quiet now. “They had to leave quickly.”

“Who did?” I know so little about him.

“The Jews in Tartu did. I started to tell you this the other night at the bar. The leaving of the house. The defining moment of the century for my family.”

“Oh God, what year are we in now?”

“Nineteen forty-four. The story still goes that Stalin’s tanks were
on their way. For my father it’s as if he left yesterday. He walked away from his bedroom and his model airplanes and his books about flight. He wanted to be a pilot.”

“He’s haunted?”

“It got decided quickly: either you were going or not. My grandfather was a scientist who figured out a way to process black-and-white film in a lab in Estonia. He took my grandmother and my father with him.”